The Pittsburgh Steel Team – a partnership between
the School of Information Sciences and CMU -- placed
first in the RoboCupRescue Virtual Robots competition. This
competition was part of RoboCup 2007, held in Atlanta
from July 3-10.
The Pittsburgh Steel edged out teams from Germany’s
Jacob's University (second place) and SPQR from the University
of Rome (third place). This year's competition attracted
nine teams from Europe and the Americas. The Steel led
throughout the entire competition, which featured teams
of simulated robots searching for victims in disaster
environments. CMU's Prasanna Velagapudi operated
the robots while SIS’s own Jijun Wang, the simulator's
developer, coded along side keeping the Steel a step
ahead of the competition.
The USARSim robotic simulation developed at SIS and
used in this competition has now been downloaded from
SourceForge more than 15,000 times and is being used
by researchers around the world. Congratulations
to these victorious RoboCup 2007 competitors!
RoboCup is an international research and education initiative.
Its goal is to foster artificial intelligence and robotics
research by providing a standard problem where a wide
range of technologies can be examined and integrated.
The concept of soccer-playing robots was first introduced
in 1993. In July 1997, the first official conference
and games were held in Nagoya, Japan, followed by Paris,
Stockholm, Melbourne, Seattle, Fukuoka/Busan, Padua,
Lisbon, Osaka and Bremen.
This is only the second time that the RoboCupRescue
Virtual Robots competition has been held as part of the
RoboCup events. At last year’s event, held
in Bremen, the Steel didn’t place in the top three
slots, but the organizers recognized the Steel Team for
its inspiring user interface and Uva ResQ for their mapping
software.
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