The Robocup-2017 robotics competitions were held in Nagoya, Japan, July 27-31, and we are very happy with our results there. AUTMan, Our joint teen-size team with Amirkabir University of Technology came in third in the world in the autonomous teen-size robot soccer competition. We also came in third in the set of technical challenges that accompany the soccer competition (push recovery, high jump, high kicks, and goal kicks). Working with larger size robots is a definite challenge over the smaller leagues, and we also had some significant equipment damage that had to be recovered from, burning out 11 servos on the first day due to a hardware malfunction. This was a significant challenge to return from, but the team did very well in spite of an even tougher slate of competitors this year. As usual this work takes a significant number of people, not all of whom can attend the competition because of limited budgets. This year our post-doctoral fellow Meng Cheng Lau, science undergraduate Chi Fung (Andy) Lun (who is a Faculty of Science research student in our lab this summer), and Engineering undergraduate Ziang (Daneil) Wang travelled to Nagoya along with Jacky Baltes, while John Anderson and Amir Hossenmemar remained back at the lab. Many thanks to our teammates at Amirkabir for their work as well!

Next up is the HuroCup multi-sport humanoid robot event in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, August 23-27. Meng Cheng, Andy, and Daniel will be remaining in Asia and working on our team as guests at the National Taiwan Normal University until the HuroCup starts, while further work continues in our lab here and further students join them later in August.

Many thanks also to the Faculty of Science, the Department of Computer Science, and the University of Manitoba, all of whom help with student travel expenses.

A larger gallery of pictures is available here.