The RoboCup, the biggest robotics and artificial intelligence competition in the world, begins on Tuesday July 4 at the Parc des Expositions in Bordeaux. A major event for robotics enthusiasts.
It’s time for the final adjustments: this Tuesday, July 4, it’s the start of a week of events specially reserved for robots from around forty countries. Until July 10, more than 2,500 participants will compete at the Parc des Expositions in Bordeaux in the biggest robotics competition in the world, the RoboCup.
>> VIDEO. With the RoboCup, robots also have their Football World Cup
” We design robots, we put them on the edge of the field and they play football on their own“, explains in particular Olivier Ly, captain of a dozen specialists in robotics, mechanics and computer science. At the University of Bordeaux, the Bordeaux team is fine-tuning the final settings for football, the flagship event of the competition. This researcher has already won it four times,”but last year we were defeated by the Japanese“, he regrets.
There is therefore a revenge to take for the five robots 70 cm high, equipped with two arms, two legs and a camera as a face. ” In terms of weight, we are around seven kilos“, estimates Céline, one of the mechanics of the team. With her colleague Loïc, she takes great care with Tom and Nova, lying on the examination table. ” The ankle, the knee, the hips… Each of these parts is driven by a motor“, details Céline, while Loïc is ” changing hip screws… It’s not always easy“. Controls welcome since “the robots fall, they crash into them, they break… The mecha team repairs, improves“, continues Olivier Ly.
Robots trained to “recognize the ball”
On the synthetic turf pitch, the metal footballers revise their training under the gaze of their coaches, laptops on their knees. “Here I am working on the different shots that the robot is able to do“, specifies one of the coaches. And to do this, one of the other coaches presses: “We trained him to recognize the ball. Manually, we have images and we come to say that, it’s a ball, that’s a corner of the field, that’s the bottom of a post… Then, we pass all that through a network of neurons and then it manages to recognize the different elements of the terrain as output.
This year, everyone would like to relive the emotions of the first victory against China in 2016: “We had extra time, shots on goal and sudden deathremembers Olivier Ly, everyone was excited to recompile code. The Chinese probably made a coding error, the robot has frozenhe completely blocked when shooting, and that’s finally how we won.“
However, the RoboCup is not just about competition: researchers take advantage of it to exchange and improve robots that can have applications in industry, agriculture or personal assistance.