TITLE: Learning to play the Guitar Using Virtual Reality

PRESENTER: James Parra Affiliation

AFFILIATION: AI Group, CS&E, UNSW

DATE: Friday, 17 November 2000 TIME: 12:00 - 13:00

PLACE: Meeting Room 1 Ground Floor Samuels Building

* All Welcome *

Enter through gate 11 in Botany Street for parking

For more information on the location see URL http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~aishare/finding/

ABSTRACT:

RoboCup is an international robot soccer competition whose aim is to encourage advanced research in mobile robots. CSE has entered teams in the Sony legged robot league for the 1999 competition in Stockholm and the 2000 competition in Melbourne. In 1999 we were runners up and in 2000 we blitzed the opposition to easily win the championship. For more information see http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~robocup or http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~claude

BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER:

Prof. Claude Sammut is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW and Head of the Artificial Intelligence Research Group. His main research interests are in Machine Learning. He led the team that won this year_s Sony legged robot soccer league, RoboCup 2000.

Seminar Convenor:

Bernhard Hengst
Tel: +61-2-9385-3988,
E-mail: bernhardh@cse.unsw.edu.au
School of Computer Science & Engineering, UNSW.

RoboCup is an international robot soccer competition whose aim is to encourage advanced research in mobile robots. There are four different leagues for different types of robots. One of the leagues is the Sony legged robot league.

CSE has entered teams in the 1999 competition in Stockholm and the 2000 competition in Melbourne. In 1999 we were runners up and in 2000 we blitzed the opposition to easily win the championship.

We are now recruiting the team for the 2001 competition which will be held in Seattle. In 2000 there were 12 teams from some of the top international robotics laboratories and in 2001 there will be 16 teams. We are looking for outstanding students who will continue UNSW's great record. This is not a project for the feint-hearted. It requires a lot of work, imagination and excellent programming skills, but if you are up to the challenge, it can be very rewarding.

In the Sony legged robot league, all teams compete with the same hardware, supplied by Sony. The difference between the teams is the software they write to get the robots to play soccer. Each robot is fully autonomous, with an on-board MIPS R4000 processor, colour camera, gyroscopes and accelerometers, infra-red and contact sensors, speaker and stereo microphones. Programs are written in C++ using a PC-based development environment. Code is loaded onto a memory stick that is inserted into the robot. After that, it's on its own. A game consists of three robots on each side with the usual aim of trying to put a ball into the opposing teams goal.

The 1999 UNSW United team consisted of two CE thesis students (John Dalgliesh and Mike Lawther) who laid the foundations of the project by developing a new way of training the robots to recognise the colours on the field, needed to identify the different objects. They also worked out an internal representation of the world and a way of localising the robots. The other teams consisted mostly of full-time research staff and PhD students from such places as Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) and the Laboratoire de Robotique de Paris (LRP), the eventual winners. They were more than a little surprised when John and Mike, mere undergraduates, finished runners up!

The 2000 team members are Bernhard Hengst (PhD student) Darren Ibbotson and Son Bao Pham (CE thesis students). Taking up where last year's team left off, Son, Darren and Bernhard improved the vision and localisation, developed completely new routines for locomotion and worked on game playing strategies, including making a start on some simple team work. By the time we got to the competition, our robots were doing things that even the Sony engineers, who designed the robots, didn't think were possible. Our team was in a class of its own. The smallest winning margin, in this year's competition, was 10-0 in the final against LRP. On the first day of competition, we had a practice match against CMU, winning 12-0. After that all the other teams knew they were competing for second place!

If you think you are up to the challenge of following in the fine tradition of the last two years, please email me (include your academic transcript or a summary of your academic record). The sooner you are able to start, the better. Working on RoboCup for a Summer Vacation Scholarship would be a good way to begin.

For more information see my home page (below) or go to http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~robocup.

Claude Sammut
Tel: +61-2-9385-3933
Fax: +61-2-9385-1814
School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of New South Wales
claude@cse.unsw.edu.au
Sydney 2052 Australia
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~claude