We have had a couple of publications this year on improving robotics competitions to encourage greater breadth and adaptivity in entries. One of these, just presented at an associated IJCAI workshop, was mentioned in an article published in the well-known German technology review Heise Online. A reasonable English Translation is available (via google language tools).
Our team leaves for the FIRA competition, and the associated International Conference on Advanced Humanoid Robotics Research in Incheon, Korea, on August 5th.
We competed in both sizes of the humanoid leagues at RoboCup-2009, in Graz, Austria. While we did not make the finals in either league, we did get three games and into the second round in small-size soccer, and our large-size robot Archie walked publicly for the first time. Archie also attended a press conference in Vienna, and it was picked up in a short story with photographs by the Associated Press that appeared around the world. The Winnipeg Free Press version is below. There is an associated gallery and Video section for the tournament.
We had a camera crew filming in the lab for an upcoming Discovery Channel show on RoboCup. RoboCup 2009 is in Graz, Austria, and we are there from June 27-July 7. The Discovery Channel will apparently be filming us there as well. See the new gallery for more images. And thanks MC, for being the only one to have a decent camera with them!
A team of five from our lab will be entering in two different sizes of humanoid competition in Graz, from June 27-July 7. Follow the action on the RoboCup 2009 Website.
The University of Manitoba hosted the Canada-Wide Science fair for all school levels in May, 2009. We were asked to provide an invited talk to everyone (thanks Shane!) and to open the lab up for group tours. So John and the grad students spent five hours doing the latter, which was an awful lot of talking. Lots more pictures in the gallery
