Related Resources

"BEST is a non-profit, volunteer-based organization whose mission is to inspire students to pursue careers in engineering, science, and technology through participation in a sports-like, science and engineering-based robotics competition."
"Botball is a hands-on learning experience in robotics designed to engage students in learning the practical applications of science, technology, engineering and math." As explained on the About Botball page: "Presented in your region by KISS Institute for Practical Robotics, the Botball Educational Robotics Program integrates science, technology, engineering and math with robotics to keep your students on the forefront of technology. Any middle or high school aged student can participate in Botball as long as the team has an adult contact. The organization of the team is up to the team leader."
Be sure to check out the [AITopics/Software#robotcode | robot products and programming tutorial]], and see what's happening at their National Conference on Educational Robotics.
And check out this Robotics and Engineering Course (available online from NASA's Robotics Alliance Project): Robotics with the XBC Controller. Instructor: David Culp (August 8 - September 7, 2006). "An introduction to key robotics and engineering concepts by utilizing a hands-on and project based approach to learning. Students will explore autonomous mobile robotic systems using advanced robotics hardware and software from the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics."
Eurobot: "An amazing event gathering fun, high technology, friendship, creativity, education and passion! Created in 1998, Eurobot is a international amateur robotics contest open to teams of young people, organised either in student projects or in independent clubs. Eurobot takes place in Europe but also welcomes countries from other continents."
"FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a multinational non-profit organization, that aspires to transform culture, making science, math, engineering, and technology as cool for kids as sports are today." "The FIRST LEGO League (FLL), considered the 'little league' of the FIRST Robotics Competition, is the result of a partnership between FIRST and the LEGO Group. FLL extends the FIRST concept of inspiring and celebrating science and technology to children aged 9 through 14, using real-world context and hands-on experimentation."
"The FIRST Robotics Competition is an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. The program is a life-changing, career-molding experienceóand a lot of fun. In 2005 the competition will reach close to 25,000 high-school-aged young people on close to 1,000 teams in 30 competitions. Our teams come from Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, Israel, Mexico, the U.K., and almost every U.S. state."
Grand Challenges: several in our collection involve robots!
RoboCup: "an international joint project to promote AI, robotics, and related field. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. RoboCup chose to use soccer game as a central topic of research, aiming at innovations to be applied for socially significant problems and industries. The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is By 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer."
Also see RoboCup-Rescue on our Hazards & Disasters page, and this article:
RoboCup Rescue: A Grand Challenge for Multiagent and Intelligent Systems. By Hiroaki Kitano and Satoshi Tadokoro. AI Magazine 22(1): Spring 2001, 39-52. "Disaster rescue is one of the most serious social issues that involves very large numbers of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment. The intention of the RoboCup Rescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels, involving multiagent teamwork coordination, physical agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision-support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies, and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive system in the future. ... In this article, we present a detailed analysis of the task domain and elucidate characteristics necessary for multiagent and intelligent systems for this domain. Then, we present an overview of the RoboCup Rescue project."
Historical note: "The idea of robots playing soccer was first mentioned by Professor Alan Mackworth (University of British Columbia, Canada) in a paper entitled 'On Seeing Robots' presented at VI-92, 1992. and later published in a book Computer Vision: System, Theory, and Applications, pages 1-13, World Scientific Press, Singapore, 1993. A series of papers on the Dynamo robot soccer project was published by his group. Independently, a group of Japanese researchers organized a Workshop on Grand Challenges in Artificial Intelligence in October, 1992 in Tokyo, discussing possible grand challenge problems. This workshop led to a serious discussions of using the game of soccer for promoting science and technology." - from A Brief History of RoboCup.
And be sure to watch Dynamos and Dynamites - The World's First Soccer Playing Robots, a collection of videos on Professor Alan Mackworth's Robot Soccer page.
Articles:
RoboCup. AI Magazine 21 (1), Spring 2000. Among the many articles you'll find in this exciting issue are: Overview of RoboCup-98 (Minoru Asada, Manuela M. Veloso, Milind Tambe, Itsuki Noda, Hiroaki Kitano, and Gerhard K. Kraetzschmar), AAAI-98 Robot Exhibition (Karen Zita Haigh and Tucker Balch), and Using Robot Competitions to Promote Intellectual Development (Robin R. Murphy)
The AAAI 2006 Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition. By Paul E. Rybski, Jeffrey Forbes, Debra Burhans, Zach Dodds, Paul Oh, Matthias Scheutz, and Bob Avanzato. AI Magazine 28(2): Summer 2007, 101.
RoboCup: 10 Years of Achievements and Future Challenges. By Ubbo Visser and Hans-Dieter Burkhard. AI Magazine 28(2): Summer 2007, 115. "Will we see autonomous humanoid robots that play (and win) soccer against the human soccer world champion in the year 2050? This question is not easy to answer, and the idea is quite visionary. However, this is the goal of the RoboCup Federation. There are serious research questions that have to be tackled behind the scenes of a soccer game: perception, decision making, action selection, hardware design, materials, energy, and more. RoboCup is also about the nature of intelligence, and playing soccer acts as a performance measure of systems that contain artificial intelligence in much the same way chess has been used over the last century. This article outlines the current situation following 10 years of research with reference to the results of the 2006 World Championship in Bremen, Germany, and discusses future challenges."
See More Readings below and AI Magazine and for more articles about RoboCup and other competitions.
"RoboFesta – Europe is part of an international movement to promote interest throughout Europe in science and technology through many different kinds of robotics activities. These include many exciting robot competitions for children and adults, expositions, technical meetings, and widespread media cover. RoboFesta began in Japan in 1999, and is rapidly spreading throughout the world."
RoboFesta-UK
RoboFesta-France
Additional countries and lots of resources can be found by using the links on any of the RoboFesta pages mentioned above.
Sodarace [a joint venture between: soda and Queen Mary, University of London]: "the online olympics pitting human creativity against machine learning in a competition to construct virtual racing robots. ... Sodarace is not just for fun. It is a shared competition for Artificial Intelligence researchers to test their learning algorithms while also being a play space in which to communicate the benefits of Artificial Intelligence research with a wide audience and promote a creative exploration of physics and engineering."
Also see:
AI in the news
Robot Competitions Over the Years: A Retrospective. AI Magazine 23:1 (Spring 2002).
Robot Competition Links from RobotBooks.com
Statistics
The International Federation of Robotics
Robotics Online, from The Robotic Industries Association, offers an assortment of very helpful resources including current news articles and Robotics Industry Statistics.
Our collection of Robotics Statistics