A soccer robot is a specialized autonomous robot and mobile robot that is used to play variants of soccer.
The main organised competitions are RoboCup or FIRA tournaments played each year.
The RoboCup contest currently has a number of soccer leagues:
Additionally, there is a RoboCupJunior league for younger students.
The qfix soccer robot "Terminator" is an omnidrive robot that can be used for RoboCup Junior. It includes a kicker and a dribbler as well as a controller board with Atmel controller.
The robot can be programmed using the GNU GCC compiler.
The Graupner "RC-SOCCERBOT" is a mobile robot platform developed by qfix which can be used as a radio-controller toy playing soccer with ping-pong balls. Gaining more experience in robotics the user can also implement C++ programs on the robot. [2]
RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition founded in 1996 by a group of university professors. The aim of the competition is to promote robotics and AI research by offering a publicly appealing – but formidable – challenge.
GuRoo is a humanoid robot developed at the Mobile Robotics Laboratory in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland. The design of the GuRoo is based on the human form and it is kept as anthropomorphic as possible. GuRoo is completely autonomous. It is used for research in different areas including dynamic stability, human-robot interaction and machine learning. GuRoo competes in the annual RoboCup. The goal of this competition is to foster the development of robotics through an annual soccer competition. It is the dream of the RoboCup federation to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots, to play against and beat the human team that wins the World Cup in the year 2050.
In computing, a visual programming language, also known as diagrammatic programming, graphical programming or block coding, is a programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements graphically rather than by specifying them textually. A VPL allows programming with visual expressions, spatial arrangements of text and graphic symbols, used either as elements of syntax or secondary notation. For example, many VPLs are based on the idea of "boxes and arrows", where boxes or other screen objects are treated as entities, connected by arrows, lines or arcs which represent relations. VPLs are generally the basis of Low-code development platforms.
RoboCup Junior (RCJ), sometimes stylised RobocupJunior, is a division of RoboCup, a not-for-profit robotics organisation. It focuses on education and aims to introduce the larger goals of the RoboCup project to primary and secondary school aged children. Participants compete in one of three main leagues: Soccer, Rescue or Dance. Dance Theatre also exists as a sub-league of Dance, and Premier Rescue is part of the competition in Australia and New Zealand.
A robot competition is an event where the abilities and characteristics of robots may be tested and assessed. Usually, they have to outperform other robots in order to win the competition. Many competitions are for schools, but several competitions with professional and hobbyist participants also exist.
Qfix robot kits are an education tool for teaching robotics. They are used in schools, high schools and mechatronics training in companies. The robot kits are also used by hobby robot builders. The qfix kits are often found in the RoboCup Junior competition where soccer robots are built of the kit's components.
The Federation of International Robot-soccer Association [sic] (FIRA) is an international organisation organising competitive soccer – usually 5-a-side – competitions between autonomous robots.
As one of the founding leagues of the international RoboCup initiative, the RoboCup Middle Size League (MSL) robot soccer competition has been organised from 1997 onwards. On an indoor soccer field, with goals of reduced size, teams of five fully autonomous soccer playing robots compete against one another. No human intervention is allowed during a match, except to take robots on or from the field. Although limitations with respect to maximum size and weight are in place, teams are completely free to design both hardware and software.
The Robotis Bioloid is a hobbyist and educational robot kit produced by the South Korean robot manufacturer Robotis. The Bioloid platform consists of components and small, modular servomechanisms called the AX-12A Dynamixels, which can be used in a daisy-chained fashion to construct robots of various configurations, such as wheeled, legged, or humanoid robots. The Robot is programmed with RoboPlus, C based software. The Bioloid system is thus comparable to the Lego Mindstorms, and VEX Robotics VEXplorer kits.
Nao is an autonomous, programmable humanoid robot formerly developed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French robotics company headquartered in Paris, which was acquired by SoftBank Group in 2015 and rebranded as SoftBank Robotics. The robot's development began with the launch of Project Nao in 2004. On 15 August 2007, Nao replaced Sony's robot dog Aibo as the robot used in the RoboCup Standard Platform League (SPL), an international robot soccer competition. The Nao was used in RoboCup 2008 and 2009, and the NaoV3R was chosen as the platform for the SPL at RoboCup 2010.
SimSpark is a generic simulation system for various multiagent simulations. It supports developing physical simulations for AI and robotics research with an open-source application framework. It is commonly used in academic research and education.
Prahlad Vadakkepat is a researcher in the field of robotics and is the founder and general secretary of the Federation of International Robot-soccer Association (FIRA) and in 2013 is its general secretary. He is an associate professor at the National University of Singapore. His research is in the areas of Humanoids, Neuro-Fuzzy Controllers, Distributed robotic systems, Biomorphic Robots, Intelligent Control techniques and Frugal Innovation.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to robotics:
Surena is a series of Iranian humanoid robots, named after the Parthian General Surena. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has placed the Surena among the prominent robots in the world after analyzing its performance.
The RoboCup 2D Simulated Soccer League is the oldest of the RoboCup Soccer Simulation Leagues. It consists of a number of competitions with computer simulated soccer matches as the main event.
The RoboCup 3D Simulated Soccer League allows software agents to control humanoid robots to compete against one another in a realistic simulation of the rules and physics of a game of soccer. The platform strives to reproduce the software programming challenges faced when building real physical robots for this purpose. In doing so, it helps research towards the RoboCup Federation's goal of developing a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team in 2050.
DARwIn-OP is a miniature-humanoid robot platform developed and manufactured by Korean robot manufacturer Robotis in collaboration with Virginia Tech, Purdue University, and University of Pennsylvania. It is also supported by a $1.2 million NSF grant. DARwIn-OP has twenty degrees of freedom, each controlled by a DYNAMIXEL MX-28T servo motor.
Cloud robotics is a field of robotics that attempts to invoke cloud technologies such as cloud computing, cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centered on the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics. When connected to the cloud, robots can benefit from the powerful computation, storage, and communication resources of modern data center in the cloud, which can process and share information from various robots or agent. Humans can also delegate tasks to robots remotely through networks. Cloud computing technologies enable robot systems to be endowed with powerful capability whilst reducing costs through cloud technologies. Thus, it is possible to build lightweight, low-cost, smarter robots with an intelligent "brain" in the cloud. The "brain" consists of data center, knowledge base, task planners, deep learning, information processing, environment models, communication support, etc.
NimbRo is the robot competition team of the Autonomous Intelligent Systems group of University of Bonn, Germany. It was founded in 2004 at the University of Freiburg, Germany.
Engineered Arts Ltd is an English engineering, designer and manufacturer of humanoid robots based in Cornwall, England. It was founded in October 2004 by Will Jackson.