Aus To Defend RoboCup Title

They say you cant teach an old dog new tricks, but innovation is the key when it comes to Australias bid to defend its world cup of canine robot soccer.

While robotic dogs have been around for a few decades now - at least conceptually - recent scientific advances have helped make events such as the RoboCup soccer tournament a serious forum for artificial intelligence.

Australias Newcastle University is looking to defend its title in the four-legged division of RoboCup in Atlanta in July.

In the four-on-four competition, puppy-sized robots play each other with only their masters programming to guide them.

Michael Quinlan, who leads the Newcastle team named NUbots, will head to his sixth world championship this year, having led Newcastles victorious RoboCup campaign against the University of NSW in Germany last year.

The team recently returned from Hanover where they were beaten by a German team in a warm-up event to the main tournament.

"Last year, our main secret was ball control - we had much better skills with the ball than pretty much every other team," Dr Quinlan said.

Teams in the tournament are all given similar units to work with and program the robots artificial intelligence systems to improve skills such as response time and ball control.

The robots operate autonomously, with no assistance from their owners either on the field or remotely.

Using optical recognition to locate and move towards the ball, engineers can only sit and watch in frustration as their creations attempt to make sense of their state of play.

Four-legged soccer is just one of the competitions in the RoboCup carnival.

Other fields in the tournament include football for larger human-sized robots, search and rescue challenges, dance simulation and domestic assistance robots.

NUbots is the only Australian team competing in the four-legged league this year.

But Dr Quinlan says the current German teams have been working hard to match NUbots play while the Australians have been pushing up against limits of the current technology.

"To be honest, theyve really just tried to play as much like us from last year," Dr Quinlan said.

"Each year, youre getting on 10 goals better than you were the year before - our team in 2006 would have beat our 2005 team around the 10-nil mark.

"I think this year will probably not be that big an improvement because I think were starting to reach the upper limit of what each robot can do."

The RoboCup tournament organisers say they hope to have a team of humanoid robots which can beat a FIFA World Cup winning team by 2050.

The tournament is aiming to build on IBMs 1997 effort, in which it defeated Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov with its supercomputer Deep Blue.

AAP

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