IUB Rescue Robots Team Overcome Challenges at RoboCup 2005 in Osaka

The IUB Rescue Robot team have just returned from RoboCup 2005 in Osaka. The rescue robot league made a giant leap this year, both in quantity and in the quality of the participating teams. This clearly indicates the strong interest in the topic of rescue robotics from various scientific communities.

[ Jul 21, 2005]  The IUB team had some very hard luck this year as it had to face one of the classic RoboCup problems, namely that the robots got stuck in the shipment process when they arrived in Japan. It took two days to get the robots out of the custody of Japanese customs, which cost the team valuable time preventing it from setting up and training. At least the second classic RoboCup problem did not occur and the robots were not wrecked in transport. The moment the robots arrived, however, they had to jump into the competition.

The IUB team demonstrated some very good mobility and negotiated some heavy terrain with its new Rugbot design, which has two large tracks and two additional small tracks that can be actively raised and lowered to stabilize the robot when going over obstacles. Furthermore, IUB successfully demonstrated autonomy, i.e., runs where the robot operates completely on its own. The robot has to negotiate the environment, to map it and to detect victims without any intervention by a human. There were only 4 teams out of 27 who managed to autonomously find victims. The best team in this category, Universität Freiburg, managed to find two victims, the other three teams including IUB found one victim each.

IUB Rescue Robots participate in "RoboCup 2005" Further information on the IUB Rescue Robot Team can be found here more info »

Robocup 2005 movieclip (7MB) An IUB rugbot going over a so-called random step field at RoboCup 2005 in Osaka. The random step field consists of losely arranged wooden poles with different heights. This forms a very hard mobility problem. The rugbots have two large tracks and two small tracks that can be actively lowered and raised. This allows to balance the robot and to even push iit over very high obstacles. more info »