INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY BREMEN

The success continues: IUB wins RoboCup US Open

    

On April 23, 2006, IUB’s RoboCup team managed another international tournament victory at the US Open Robot Rescue League in Atlanta, prevailing against the other competing institutions only two weeks after their success at the Dutch Open in Eindhoven.

[ Apr 25, 2006]  The ten contesting teams in Atlanta included such renowned institutions as the Georgia Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University, which demonstrated with their impressive investments into their teams the importance of research on search and rescue robots in the US. Georgia Tech had two teams within the competition, one of them using the best mobile research platform that is currently available on the market. A team from Carnegie Mellon University had even six robots running including a high-end commercial platform for search and rescue missions.

IUB took a more minimalist approach, participating with only two team members and a single robot. The IUB robot demonstrated once more its unique combination of advanced locomotion capabilities with onboard intelligence in locating the “victims” in a staged disaster scenario as well as in collecting high quality information about the environment. The team showed a very good and stable performance in a tough competition. In arranging the arenas the organizers from the National Institute of Technology (NIST) had been pushing hard to test the robots in conditions like in real disasters and to get systems that are actually usable in the field. Based on feedback from rescue workers from different US agencies, they have raised the bar considerably compared to previous competitions.

IUB was able to match the challenge and provide a reliable system. “Of course we are happy that the “dress rehearsals” before the big contest this summer went so well. However, we still see room for improvement of our systems before the Bremen world championship,” says Andreas Birk, Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and head of the IUB RoboCup Team.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Andreas Birk
Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Phone: +49 421 200-3113
E-Mail: a.birk@iu-bremen.de

 

Author: Kristin Beck. Last updated on 25.04.2006. © 2006 International University Bremen, Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen. All rights reserved. No unauthorized reproduction. http://www.iu-bremen.de. For all general inquiries, please call IUB at +49 421 200-4100 or mail to iub@iu-bremen.de.