Successful “test run” for RoboCup World Championship:
IUB Team wins Dutch Open Rescue League

On April 9, 2006, IUB’s RoboCup team won the finale of the international RoboCup rescue competition Dutch Open in Eindhoven with a large lead. The success of the IUB robots was mainly based on their at present unique combination of high mobility and autonomous intelligence.

[ Apr 10, 2006]  With its performance in the final round the IUB team scored 185.5 points, almost three times as many as the runner-up team. The points reflect the robots’ ability to locate “victims” in a staged disaster scenario as well as the quality of information they collect about the environment, especially in form of a map, and the robots’ mobility. Andreas Birk, head of the IUB team and IUB Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, comments the success: "At the Dutch Open the IUB robots have demonstrated a new level of combined advanced locomotion capabilities with onboard intelligence up to autonomy that currently is a unique feature of our systems and has not been observed at RoboCup competitions before. Other research groups and institutes either specialize on hardware to optimize mobility or on software for the intelligent robot features." As the Eindhoven score would have secured the IUB team one of the top positions in last year’s world championship in Osaka, Japan, the IUB robot specialist sees the Dutch Open success as a very encouraging test run for this year’s Bremen world championship. The US Open 2006 in April in Atlanta provide another chance for testing the IUB robots in a challenging international competition before the big Bremen tournament in June.