Who won RoboCup 2007?
RoboCup 2007, the international robot soccer, rescue and home chore competition, concluded Sunday night with an awards ceremony, but some are still wondering who won.
The organization used Wikipedia as a central location from which to post results for its different events, but the information from many links remained incomplete as of Monday afternoon. It's left some followers of the event flummoxed.
About 300 teams, comprising 1,700 people from 37 countries, participated in RoboCup 2007, which was held this year at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
The event to promote artificial intelligence and robotics included soccer games, search-and-rescue missions and home assistance tasks performed by humanoid and legged robots of various sizes, as well as soccer drills with microscopic robots. This year an aerial robotics competition was also added to the list of events.
"The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is to, by 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer," according to the organization's mission statement.
Award for the Best Humanoid Robot seems to have gone to Team Osaka from Japan for their kid-size humanoid soccer robots, while the award for soccer with medium-size robots went to the Tribots from the University of Osnabruck in Germany. (That's based on wading through schedule charts posted on the RoboCup 2007 Wikipedia site.)
Results for the RoboCup 2007 legged league, those programming legged robots such as the Sony Aibo to play soccer, were clear. The Northern Bites, a team from Bowdoin College in Maine, are the RoboCup 2007 soccer champs, according to the college's press office, as well as the Northern Bites' team blog. The team plans to go see the new Transformers movie as part of their celebratory activities. A German team comprising students from Humboldt Universitat Berlin, Universitat Bremen and Technische Universitat Darmstadt took first place for the technical challenge.
RoboCup 2007 Junior, the competition for elementary through high school students, included three categories: soccer, dance and rescue. Those winners have not yet been posted.
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. E-mail her at candacelombardi@gmail.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. 
