Robot world championship title stays in Australia

A team from the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering has won the RoboCup world soccer championships for the second year in a row. The head of the school, Professor Maurice Pagnucco, believes there are important lessons from the tournament that can be applied to the automation, control and instrumentation industries. Pagnucco will be sharing his thoughts at the ACI Connect conference in Sydney next week.

He said the UNSW team won the Standard Platform League, which he described as the “IndyCar version of robotic soccer” in the sense that everyone uses the same platform: a 58 cm tall humanoid robot called the NAO made by Aldebaran Robotics.

At the conference, Pagnucco will speak on ‘RoboCup as a catalyst for future education and skills training in the ACI sector’.

“What I’d like to talk about is the sort of technology that’s involved in programming these robots to play soccer autonomously,” he said.

“A lot of people come along, look at the robots and assume they’re remote controlled. No, they’re not. They’re fully autonomous robots. So what goes into doing that? And why is that important from an educational/training point of view in terms of turning out high-quality graduates that presumably companies that are at this conference will be interested in hiring?”

He said some of their best students take part in RoboCup and they tend to pick up fantastic jobs, be it in Australia or overseas.

“They’re in high demand overseas — the Microsofts, the Googles, the Facebooks of the world hire a lot of our graduates and a lot of them have been in RoboCup,” Pagnucco said.

“I think for them the skill that they see is when you’ve got to maintain a codebase of 150,000 lines of code and you’ve got to be able to come in and understand it and then you’ve got to develop on it and so on, you learn a lot of software engineering, what it’s like to be a professional software engineer pretty much.”

He gave an example of a former student involved in RoboCup who later developed a system for a sawmill that cut the power to the saw if the operator’s hands got too close to it.

“They did that by making sure the operator had brightly coloured gloves and then they used some of the techniques we use to find objects on the field to do that really, really quickly,” he said.

“You need to do that really quickly, otherwise the person’s going to lose a couple of fingers. So they adapted techniques they developed for playing RoboCup soccer to this health and safety software.”

The ACI Connect conference is at Sydney Olympic Park on 12-13 August. More information can be found at www.aciconnect.com.au.

Source: Engineers Australia.