RoboCup soccer for 2010?

February 2008 News

Interest has been shown in forming a local organising committee (LOC) with the mandate to prepare a bid to bring the RoboCup event to South Africa in 2010 to bootstrap on the FIFA World Cup to be held here in that same year.

RoboCup has been running for 11 years and is considered by many to be the most important robotics competition in the world. The objectives of RoboCup are to promote education and research in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and related fields by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined.

RoboCup and includes three major themes:

* RoboCup Soccer: The goal of this project is to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can compete against the human world champion team in soccer by the year 2050.

* RoboCup Rescue: This promotes research in socially significant issues and includes real robot and simulation leagues.

* RoboCup Junior: This robotics event is for elementary and high school students and includes three challenges: soccer, rescue, and dance.

The scale of RoboCup is huge. At the 2007 event in Atlanta, USA some 2000 students and scientists from more than 30 countries participated. The event also attracts many thousands of visitors.

To move the South African 2010 hosting project forward a core LOC needs to be formed with a mandate to prepare the bid documentation, gather sponsorship interest and negotiate with the international body, RoboCup Federation.

For more information contact Mike Barker, +27 (0) 83 6277673, [email protected] or visit www.robocup.org

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