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Evolving from Four Legs to Two

UNSW was one of only 16 universities worldwide to be selected to compete with the new Nao bipedal Robots.

UNSW has been the major player in a worldwide robot soccer competition over the last decade. It's called RoboCup, and it's fought by two teams of four adorable AIBO robot dogs. Our team, rUNSWift, has the best track record in the world: three-time world champions, three-time runners up, one third place and one quarter-finalist. But there is trouble in robot paradise: Sony has discontinued its AIBO line, bring the imminent end to the League.

But a French robotics start-up called Aldebaran has stepped up to take its place. "This year we've got a brand new platform: the NAO", says RoboCup team member David Collien. Measuring about 60cm tall and walking on two legs, the NAO could be mistaken for a small, plastic-armoured child. UNSW was just one of 16 teams from around the world to be selected to participate in this new League.

This new robot presents some interesting challenges for this year's RoboCup team "It's still being developed," says David. "We received a prototype a couple of weeks ago and we've already broken it about five or six times. The head's come off a fair bit." The team now calls the robot the "Bandage Bear" due to all the gaffer-tape holding it together.

This hearkens back to the first days of UNSW's involvement in RoboCup. According to Mike Lawther from the original team, "It wasn't until April or so that we got our first dog (quickly christened StupidDog, because of all the trouble we had making him do anything!) StupidDog was really cool looking though - just the insides, no plastic skin, and things held in place with gaffer-tape. It was probably May by the time we had the little rascal walking around." But David is confident that things are going to be easier this time, "We haven't got the perfect environment, but we're making progress. For all the vision and localisation - seeing stuff and working out where you are on the field - the algorithms are pretty much the same. We just have to move it across to the new platform and re-tune it. That's been a fairly large job though."

"But the locomotion is completely new. It's a biped robot, so it's got a lot of new challenges where movement's concerned because a biped robot moves like an inverted pendulum - it's in an unstable equilibrium. With four legs we didn't have to worry so much about it falling over. Getting all the basic stuff (although it's hardly basic!) down is our main task right now. Then we can move on to the real AI stuff, the strategy." This kind of groundwork is why the competition was invented.

Says David, "Robotics in general brings together almost every discipline: networking, probability, electronics, control theory, algorithms. It brings together everything and playing soccer, is a pretty fun way of putting it all together." Indeed, one of the goals of RoboCup is to encourage children to get involved through their Robocup Junior League. The Junior League includes a dance competition, a maze-navigating rescue competition, and a miniature version of the soccer competition. These are all designed to help younger people see the cooler side of computing and robotics.