Robots ready to rumble

SAN FRANCISCO--Homemade robots packed in wooden crates lined the walls at the San Francisco State University gym, as Nicholas Hotary and his father, Kevin, checked out the competition while assembling the last parts for "Funnel Cloud."

"What do we get if we win?" asked 7-year-old Nicholas.

"We get a medal," said the hopeful 46-year-old research scientist from the University of Michigan.

News.context

What's new:
Participants and fans have converged at RoboGames in San Francisco to see robots show their stuff in contests from sumo to soccer.

Bottom line:
The annual robot competition is a way for creators to learn and share knowledge. The ultimate goal: to develop robots that can do more tasks that only humans can do.

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"Is that it?" his son quipped.

Learning and sharing knowledge are the goals of the second annual robot competition called RoboGames, formerly Robolympics. That might sound hokey, but it's something that doesn't happen enough--to the detriment of robotics, said David Calkins, president of the Robotics Society of America and organizer of the event.

"The participants never really talk to each other, and they have so much to learn from one another," said Calkins, also a professor of robotics and computer engineering at San Francisco State University. "At something like this, people can cross-pollinate in different disciplines, since they're all in the same place at the same time, when so many new things are going on."

At RoboGames, 650 participants compete in a number of categories, from combat to sumo. For each event, Robots must have different specialties, which take time for their builders to learn and hone. Robots for the soccer event, for instance, have standard hardware--four Sony Aibo robot dogs--and require more programming skills than those for the combat events, which need more mechanical know-how. By combining both sets of skills, robots can be programmed to react to completely new situations and physically respond.

Ultimately, the goal is to create robots that can do more tasks that normally, only humans can do.

"We're working to make them smart enough to work in an environment they don't know, in hopes of making them more useful," said Walter Nistico, a Ph.D. student from Germany.

While it will be some time before robots can do everything humans can, they're already being used in certain situations, such as search and rescue operations, surveillance and manufacturing.

"Some of the basic research for those activities is being done at events such as this," said Luca Iocchi, an assistant professor at the University of Rome.

Nistico and Iocchi have been working on robots to participate in the soccer match. They say there is a challenge within the scientific community to create humanoid robots by 2050 that can compete

Where's Nicolas' other father ? Or is the comma missing in lead?

CNET ...

[thomashawk]

Robots, Did Somebody Say Robots

I've got more photos here:

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