Robocup is a worldwide robotics competition event held annually. The main categories are Soccer, Rescue and Dance, with Soccer being the most popular. This year’s event took place in Singapore between 19-25th June and hosted 500 teams from 40 different countries and a total of more than 3000 participants. The number of teams and participants grows every year. The official goal of the Robocup Soccer competition is to have a fully autonomous robot soccer team which will be able to defeat the most recent FIFA World Cup winner, by mid century. In general, soccer games in robotics is particularly of interest to engineers and robot builders, as it involves many […] Read More

This years event will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, and the main focus is “Advancement of New Frontiers for Providing Better Intelligent Robots Services”.Among the workshops that will take place are: Best control practices for service robots, Congitive enhancement of robots using web as a source, Semantic Mapping and Autonomous knowledge acquisition, Evolutionary and Adaptive Robotics, Grasp planning and task learning by imitation, Robot Vision Challenge workshop. This is one of the most well known robotics event in the world, on development of robotics. For the event home page, please visit here. Read More

Latest international Robot Exhibition in Japan took place between November 25th and 28th in Japan. Many cool robots were on display such as an Autonomous cargo transport robot, a robotic hand that is able to imitate a human hand’s every move, robotic skates that can move forward when they sense a forward movement from the person wearing it, a ping pong playing robot called topio that looked extremely human and a teleoperated fembot that looked like the “female terminator”. For the official site please visit here.. For the robot pictures gallery visit here. Reference: www.popsci.com Read More

One of the biggest robot competition events in USA, BEST has just announced the Middle and High School events of this year. The competition will take place on December 11th and December 12th at Auburn University. Over 3500 students, teachers, sponsors and other supporters are attending to this year’s event. Alabama Governor Bob Riley will also attend to the event as a speaker. The event is free however a pre registration is required by December 4th. Reference: www.southsbest.org Read More

Three robots, powered by lasers, competed last week on November 4th, to climb a rope of one kilometer high hanging from a helicopter. The goal was to finish the distance at the same time by climbing with at least 2 meters/sec speed. The goal of the competition is to set up the knowledgebase for a future space elevator that will allow reaching out to space without the expense and risk of using rockets. The laser power system is basically pointing laser beams from the ground to the photovoltaic cells at the robot’s surface, so that the robot doesn’t have to carry its own power source. If it becomes a reality, […] Read More

China plans to hold an olympic game next year. But in this one humans are only admitted as coachs. The robots, more specifically, two legged (bipedal) and two armed humanoid / android robots will compete only. No other type of robot will be admitted. The competition will span as wide range or events as possible, such as robofight, dancing, track and field, domestic service and medical service. There will be 20 countries and 100 universities participating. There are currently other large scale international robotic competition events. A few are, robogames, eurobot, world robot olympiad, international robot olympiad, robocup. Reference: www.pcworld.com/article/181462/only_robots_allowed_at_chinas_next_olympics.html Read More

We would like to inform our readers about upcoming events this October on advanced robotics concepts and design: The 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems will take place on October 11 to 15, 2009 at St. Louis, MO, USA. There are a huge number of topics that will be discussed in this event for every aspect of robotic design and artificial intelligence. See event website here. Next, there is the 6th International Conference on Ubiqitous Robots and Ambient Intelligence. The event will take place between October 29-31 in Gwangju, Korea. Again a large number of topics will be discussed in the big event, such as different types […] Read More

In the latest AUVSI, Association for Unmanned Systems International challenge 2009, the International Aerial Robotics Competition, the winning team’s robot was a helicopter that can navigate inside a building by itself and find and image a control panel, without the use of any GPS. The hardware of the system was designed by a team in Germany, a startup company called Ascending Technologies, where the software was developed at MIT of USA. The helicopter is lifted with four propellers and has a carbon fiber frame. It has a laser scanner that has a range of 32 yards. The robot uses its scanner to map the surrounding area and also communicates constantly […] Read More

Twelfth International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition took place between July 31st through August 2nd, in Point Loma, CA.The event included record number of participants this year, 30 teams from major universities and educational institutions from U.S., Canada, Japan, Korea and India. Two high school teams also participated. The qualification for the competition was based on designing an unmanned vehicle, capable of navigating realistic underwater surroundings, at the same time performing tasks such as docking at a station, marking a location or recovering an object. The pool that the competition took place was 40’ deep and was built in 1964. The competition was sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems […] Read More

One of the largest robotics competition, Robocup, took place in Graz, Austria, on June 2009 and lasted 5 days. This years event was organized by Graz University of technology. 408 teams, approximately 2000 robots and 2300 humans participated in the event. The main areas of competition were soccer, dancing and domestic chores. The current platform for soccer was the NAO robot form Aldebaran robotics. Here is the official brochure from the robocup organization. And here is the final match from last year’s competition: Read More