Winning students in the RoboCup Ireland competition are off to Germany to watch their hard-working robots compete internationally, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
A robot army descended on Dublin last week as the inaugural "RoboCup Ireland" took place. Small autonomous robots designed by teams of Transition Year students battled it out for a chance to travel to Bremen, Germany next month to compete in the international RoboCup championship.
The competition is an effective way to get students involved in subjects associated with the sciences, engineering and information technology, explains Eoin Geraghty of the National College of Ireland in Dublin where the event took place.
Geraghty is the NCI's director of student recruitment and publications and is also the Irish representative to the RoboCup Federation.
The international RoboCup movement started in Japan in 1992 where researchers were looking for "Grand Challenges in Artificial Intelligence". They hit on the idea of fielding a team of humanoid robots good enough to beat the World Cup champions, accomplishing this by 2050.
While such a goal clearly is a tall order, this ambition has sparked an international movement that is helping to attract students back to the idea of doing science and engineering, Geraghty says.
It includes students from countries around the world from Australia to Germany and the US to Britain and now Ireland is joining, he explains.
The students are asked to produce a working robot that can take part in one of three competitions. The robot must either play soccer, serve as an autonomous "rescue robot" by finding casualties in a damaged building or dance in time with a piece of music.
Having three so very different challenges means the teams putting the robots together must use different solutions in response to technical problems, says Geraghty. "That is why the Federation went for three different challenges, they have to use different sensor types and no one robot could do all of the tasks."
In all cases the students start with a set of "Mindstorm" Lego, a building set that includes a variety of sensors, programmable microchips, battery packs and switches. Students can add refinements of their own but most of what they will need comes from these sets.
Last Friday's competition pitted robot against robot. Belvedere College Dublin were the soccer winners with Malahide Community School as the runners-up; St Aidan's CBS were the rescue robot winners with Malahide Community School also runners-up in this category; and Our Lady's College, Greenhills, Drogheda won the robot dance competition with runners-up from Our Lady's College Drogheda.
Additional awards included best sponsorship to St Thomas's Community College; best posterboard went to Ursuline College, Sligo; and most creative robot to Blackrock College.
UK teams have competed in the competition since 2002, stated Open University's "Robofesta" research fellow, Dr Ashley Green, who is also the UK representative to the RoboCup Federation.
He sees great benefits for the students taking part. "The youngsters tend to engage in it very intensively and it is a long term experience for them."
The idea is to encourage more students to take an interest in the sciences and engineering, he says and there is some evidence that this is happening. "But it isn't just about recruiting more engineers. It opens up the prospect of pursuing any subject," he adds. This brings more students into third level, whatever the course.
Last week's competition at the NCI was in the RoboCup Junior category. Internationally there are also categories for primary pupils and also third-level students.
This was a pilot project involving 23 schools and about 125 Transition year students, Geraghty says. "Next year we hope to spread it nationwide and include more third level institutions."
Universities and institutes would be asked to serve as venues where regional heats could take place in the run-up to a grand finale where the teams to be sent to the international competition would be selected.