JACOBS UNIVERSITY BREMEN

Jacobs University is Vice World Champion at RoboCup 2007

   

In this years RoboCup world championship, which was carried out from June 30 to July 8, 2007, at Georgia Tech University, Atlanta, USA, the Jacobs Rescue Robot team came in second with 236 point, defeated only by a very small margin of 11 points by the team from Carnegie Mellon University in a heart-stop final of the Virtual Rescue League. Both teams scored very closely to each other throughout the whole competition and were always well ahead of the other competing teams. The Virtual Rescue League consists of virtual challenges for real and virtual robots and tests their intelligence and practical performance in various rescue scenarios.

[ Jul 09, 2007]  Eight research groups in total competed in this league where a high fidelity simulator is used to evaluate the performance of virtual search and rescue robots in various disaster scenarios developed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to train first responders. The virtual robots are very realistic simulations of their real world counterparts like the Jacobs Rescue Robots, which also participated in the real Robot Rescue League of the world championship. The team demonstrated a high amount of intelligence up to full autonomy onboard of the robots. A single operator supervised a team of four cooperating robots, which jointly explored the disaster scenario to search for victims.

The real robots - on which the virtual ones are based - ended as the only non-Asian team in the top five of the Robot Rescue League where sixteen teams in total competed. The real robots had to face a very tough competition from US, European, and Australian teams including famous institutions like Caltech, which they all could beat. But the four top ranks went in the end to Asian teams, which are extremely strong in mobility but lack the onboard intelligence that the Jacobs robots demonstrated. The Jacobs rescue team is world wide unique in its capability to find victims autonomously as well as under conditions that impose severe locomotion challenges.

The Jacobs team also demonstrated in the RoboCup@Space demo how intelligent mobile robots can engage in planetary exploration. The team showed a novel approach to terrain classification, which based on 3D perception allowed to robots to determine safe passages for navigation.

 


Author: Corporate Communications. Last updated on 10.07.2007. © 2007 Jacobs University Bremen, Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen. All rights reserved. No unauthorized reproduction. http://www.jacobs-university.de. For all general inquiries, please call the university at +49 421 200-40 or mail to info@jacobs-university.de.