UC ROBOTICS TEAM
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The University of Canterbury
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(UC) team, ‘Electric Sheep’,
was the only New Zealand
team to compete and qualify at
the international RoboCup 2019
competition, in Sydney, Australia,
recently.
The UC team qualified for the
Humanoid League category of the
event, which challenges participants
to design and build autonomous
robot teams capable of playing
soccer against each other.
The cross-disciplinary team of
UC students, graduates and PhD
candidates faced many challenges
in creating soccer-playing robots,
with robotic skills such as dynamic
walking, running, kicking the ball, selflocalisation
and visual perception of
the ball, other players and the field
posing many technical challenges.
Sponsored by UC’s College of
Engineering, HIT Lab NZ and
School of Product Design, the
UC team succeeded in creating a
new humanoid robot platform with
a significantly low budget. Each
unit cost approximately US$3,000
– compared to an average of
US$20,000 for other teams.
Electric Sheep made it to round two
in their inaugural appearance at the
RoboCup event, while team member
UC Human Interface Technology PhD
student Merel Keijsers was chosen
to referee the England vs Indonesia
match in the final knockout rounds.
“We managed to make quite an
impression, with the organisers
coming up to us to confirm that we
should try to get selected for the
2020 cup,” Keijsers says.
The UC team saw some of their
competitors with “three or four
times our budget, a couple years of
RoboCup experience, and twice the
number of people” fail to get their
robots up and running.
“It made us very aware
and very proud of how
much we managed to
achieve. Eventually we just
ran out of time, but we got very
close to being serious competition
for the other teams,” Keijsers says.
Electric Sheep teammate UC
Computer Science PhD student Dan
Barry agrees.
“We set out to push the boundaries
on multiple fronts and have shown
that we’re a new team to watch out
for on the international level,” he
says.
The team plans to open-source the
platform to allow future teams to
more easily enter the competition
and to encourage more people to
get involved in robotics.
“The thing with these events is that
you can see the boundaries of what’s
possible shifting and being pushed
right in front of you. Most teams
are keen to share their knowledge,
so what’s exceptional this year will
be incorporated into what other
teams do the next, with exponential
development as a consequence,”
Keijsers says.
“The open-sourcing that we are
doing is part of the overall culture
of the league. Of course everyone
tries to get an edge over the others,
but at the same time it’s a bunch
of very enthusiastic science nerds
and everyone is willing to share the
innovations they’ve come up with.”
ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION
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