#RoboCup2024 – day by day digest: 21 July

A break in play throughout a Small Size League match.

Today, 21 July, noticed the competitions draw to a detailed in an exciting finale. In the third and ultimate of our round-up articles, we offer a flavour of the motion from this final day. If you missed them, yow will discover our first two digests right here: 19 July | 20 July.

My first port of name this morning was the Standard Platform League, the place Dr Timothy Wiley and Tom Ellis from Team RedbackBots, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, demonstrated an thrilling development that’s distinctive to their crew. They have developed an augmented actuality (AR) system with the goal of enhancing the understanding and explainability of the on-field motion.

The RedbackBots travelling crew for 2024 (L-to-R: Murray Owens, Sam Griffiths, Tom Ellis, Dr Timothy Wiley, Mark Field, Jasper Avice Demay). Photo credit score: Dr Timothy Wiley.

Timothy, the tutorial chief of the crew defined: “What our students proposed at the end of last year’s competition, to make a contribution to the league, was to develop an augmented reality (AR) visualization of what the league calls the team communication monitor. This is a piece of software that gets displayed on the TV screens to the audience and the referee, and it shows you where the robots think they are, information about the game, and where the ball is. We set out to make an AR system of this because we think it’s so much better to view it overlaid on the field. What the AR lets us do is project all of this information live on the field as the robots are moving.”

The crew has been demonstrating the system to the league on the occasion, with very constructive suggestions. In reality, one of many groups discovered an error of their software program throughout a sport while attempting out the AR system. Tom stated that they’ve obtained quite a lot of concepts and strategies from the opposite groups for additional developments. This is likely one of the first (if not, the primary) AR system to be trialled throughout the competitors, and first time it has been used within the Standard Platform League. I used to be fortunate sufficient to get a demo from Tom and it undoubtedly added a brand new stage to the viewing expertise. It might be very fascinating to see how the system evolves.

Mark Field establishing the MetaQuest3 to make use of the augmented actuality system. Photo credit score: Dr Timothy Wiley.

From the principle soccer space I headed to the RoboCupJunior zone, the place Rui Baptista, an Executive Committee member, gave me a tour of the arenas and launched me to a number of the groups which were utilizing machine studying fashions to help their robots. RoboCupJunior is a contest for varsity youngsters, and is break up into three leagues: Soccer, Rescue and OnStage.

I first caught up with 4 groups from the Rescue league. Robots determine “victims” inside re-created catastrophe eventualities, various in complexity from line-following on a flat floor to negotiating paths via obstacles on uneven terrain. There are three completely different strands to the league: 1) Rescue Line, the place robots observe a black line which leads them to a sufferer, 2) Rescue Maze, the place robots want to analyze a maze and determine victims, 3) Rescue Simulation, which is a simulated model of the maze competitors.

Team Skollska Knijgia, participating within the Rescue Line, used a YOLO v8 neural community to detect victims within the evacuation zone. They educated the community themselves with about 5000 pictures. Also competing within the Rescue Line occasion had been Team Overengeniering2. They additionally used YOLO v8 neural networks, on this case for 2 components of their system. They used the primary mannequin to detect victims within the evacuation zone and to detect the partitions. Their second mannequin is utilized throughout line following, and permits the robotic to detect when the black line (used for almost all of the duty) adjustments to a silver line, which signifies the doorway of the evacuation zone.

Left: Team Skollska Knijgia. Right: Team Overengeniering2.

Team Tanorobo! had been participating within the maze competitors. They additionally used a machine studying mannequin for sufferer detection, coaching on 3000 images for every kind of sufferer (these are denoted by completely different letters within the maze). They additionally took images of partitions and obstacles, to keep away from mis-classification. Team New Aje had been participating within the simulation contest. They used a graphical person interface to coach their machine studying mannequin, and to debug their navigation algorithms. They have three completely different algorithms for navigation, with various computational value, which they will change between relying on the place (and complexity) within the maze by which they’re situated.

Left: Team Tanorobo! Right: Team New Aje.

I met two of the groups who had just lately introduced within the OnStage occasion. Team Medic’s efficiency was primarily based on a medical situation, with the crew together with two machine studying components. The first being voice recognition, for communication with the “patient” robots, and the second being picture recognition to categorise x-rays. Team Jam Session’s robotic reads in American signal language symbols and makes use of them to play a piano. They used the MediaPipe detection algorithm to search out completely different factors on the hand, and random forest classifiers to find out which image was being displayed.

Left: Team Medic Bot Right: Team Jam Session.

Next cease was the humanoid league the place the ultimate match was in progress. The area was packed to the rafters with crowds wanting to see the motion.
Standing room solely to see the Adult Size Humanoids.

The finals continued with the Middle Size League, with the house crew Tech United Eindhoven beating BigHeroX by a convincing 6-1 scoreline. You can watch the livestream of the ultimate day’s motion right here.

The grand finale featured the winners of the Middle Size League (Tech United Eindhoven) in opposition to 5 RoboCup trustees. The people ran out 5-2 winners, their superior passing and motion an excessive amount of for Tech United.