Robots competing in a soccer match. (Jiji)

Homemade robots got the chance to try out their techniques in a competition known as RoboCup 2002 Fukuoka/Busan, which was held at the Fukuoka Dome on June 19-25. The highlight of this event was the soccer tournament pitting robots from around the world against each other. This year "humanoid" robots took part in the event for the first time, and the long-term goal of this effort is "to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world-champion soccer team by 2050." While realizing this goal is still far away, the first steps have already been taken.

Event Coincides with World Cup
The aim of the RoboCup is to merge robotics with artificial intelligence and develop the resulting combination. The idea for the tournament was put forth by Japanese researchers, and the first RoboCup was held in Nagoya in 1997. Subsequent events were held in Paris, Stockholm, Melbourne, and Seattle, and this year's event in Fukuoka is the sixth. Like the World Cup, RoboCup was co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, and a record number of participants turned out - about 1,000 people in 193 teams from 30 countries. The event was open to the public for the five-day period ending June 23, and about 120,000 showed up to catch a glimpse of the robots.

The main event of RoboCup was the soccer competition. Previously, most of the robots have been bucket-shaped machines that run on wheels, but bipedal "humanoid" robots made their debut this year, and there were a total of five separate leagues. The most intense competition, though, is in the middle-size robot league, and technical progress is being made there every year. This year corporate teams took part. Aside from turning the robots on at the beginning of the match and off afterwards, there is no human control of the robots during the match. The robots communicate with their "teammates" by virtue of a wireless network, and they try to kick an orange ball into a yellow or blue goal.

Robots in the humanoid league range from 40 to 180 centimeters in height, and there were 12 teams in this league. But even though this is the "humanoid" league, technology has just recently been developed to the point of allowing bipedal robots to walk, so a soccer match among them is out of the question at present. Instead, the humanoid robots are timed on how long it takes them to walk a distance equivalent to five times their height, and they are also graded on how many goals they can score out of five penalty kicks, among other things. The Gifu Industries' Association's NAGARA was the winning team, as its robots converted the most penalty kicks and demonstrated the ability to walk smoothly.

Aiming to Best Human Players
The researchers from all the different countries that are participating in RoboCup intend to create a team of robots that will be able to defeat the World Cup champion team by the year 2050. The technology is improving by leaps and bounds every year, and the robots are now able to pass and shoot accurately. The open nature of the competition has played a role in the rapid technological progress; after the matches, all of the technology and techniques are made public so that the participants can learn from each other.

It is hoped that the research and development involved will lead to the appearance of new technologies that can be used by industry and ordinary companies. For example, experts have noted that technology making it possible to avoid obstacles and to move faster will be useful in expanding the range of activities that industrial robots can handle, and they have also pointed out that the use of wireless technology in places where there is a great deal of background noise, such as factories, offers much potential.

In addition to the soccer competitions, there were also contests, both real and simulated, involving rescue robots. In the Rescue Robot league, robots searched through the rubble of a collapsed building, attempting to locate a human-sized doll. In the Rescue Simulation league, a similar disaster was constructed on a computer screen, and the programs entered in the competition gave directions to simulated police and rescue personnel in order to locate the victims.

One application of this new technology that has caught the attention of many local governments is a computer program that simulates a major disaster in a metropolitan area. Different techniques of preventing the spread of damage and rescuing as many people as possible can be tested against one another in order to find the most effective methods of dealing with such a crisis.