Carlos Jaramillo's
Distributed Research Experience as Undergraduate (Summer 2009)

Activities Statement

My mentor, Elizabeth Sklar, was a RoboCup Trustee representing the Junior division. The RoboCup 2009 event was held at the Stadthalle Graz, Austria from June 29 to July 5. The event's website is: http://www.robocup2009.org

My DREU colleague, Andres Concepcion, and I, participated as volunteers for the RoboCup Junior Rescue team, with participants from primary and secondary schools from about 30 different countries. In the venue, we worked on organizing student teams, rescue and dance challenges, refereeing robot soccer and rescue games, and generally helping out the event organizers.

We were also able to attend the academic conference portion of the event, the RoboCup International Symposium to hear talks on a wide range of topics on robotics research, such as:

Creating Photo Maps with an Aerial Vehicle in USARsim SSL-Vision: The Shared Vision System for the RoboCup Small-Size League Real-Time Hand Gesture Recognition for Human-Robot Interaction Applying Dynamic Walking Control for Biped Robots A Characterization of 3D Sensors for Response Robots

Journal of the Event

The local chairs of RCJ Rescue:
• Karl Voit
• Willibald Krenn

Wednesday: Registration opened at 8 am on Wednesday. At 3:00 pm we attended a meeting with test-runs so that we could make sure everything was clear for all volunteers.

Thursday to Saturday: We started each day with a meeting of all volunteers at 8:30 am. The first round (round = "all primary or secondary teams have one run on the competition fields") started at 9:30 am. At 11:00 am we had the second round of the day. (Note that one round lasts 90 minutes.) From 12:30 am to 2 pm there is a break where we all had lunch and recovered a little bit. The afternoon runs started at 2 pm: The first one lasted until half past three pm (15:30). We then had a 30 minutes break and proceeded with the last run of the day from 4 pm to half past 5 pm (17:30).
We had a very short meeting afterwards.

Sunday: On Sunday we only had rounds among the best SuperTeams, and the closing ceromony at 2 pm

Workflow & General Plan

The follwoing is an idea about the workflow and the general set up:

There were three competition and four practice fields at our disposal, and there were 25 primary and 34 secondary teams registered. One run lasted 15 minutes comprising 8 minutes competition, and 5 minutes "change time".

We had one judge and one "writer" per team and two teams per competition field. (Hence, 2 judges and 2 writers per field.) Within the 5 minutes change time, the mark sheets have to be transferred to the back office.

There were a few volunteers supervising the practice fields, and one or two in the back office, entering score sheets.

Map of the Venue at Stadthalle Graz

Certificate of Participation

Final Thoughts About the Event

My experience at RoboCup 2009 (Graz, Austria) increased my passion for robotics and technology, and it has made me aware of the current limitations we are facing regarding to what has been done and what still needs to be accomplished - specially with humanoid robots, as the ambitious Robocup's goal of one day being able to have a futbol-soccer match between humans and robots.

As a volunteer, I was assigned the role of judge and score-writer for the Robocup Junior Rescue competition, which allowed me to observe how education with robots has quickly spread around the world at such young ages. However, myself being a minority (born and raised in South-America), I was disappointed to find out that the absence of competitors from this continent, with the exception of Brazil.

In this year's Juniors' league, two teams of participants were grouped into "superteams", with the attempt of enhancing the sense of community and to give participants the opportunity to make friends with people from different cultures. At a more personal level, I was lucky to meet organizers, volunteers, and participants from all over the world, with whom I could exchange ideas and opinions about our common interest in the field of robotics and technology.

I was a little disappointed by not seeing open-source software being heavily used across the majority of teams. However, the Symposium talks that I was able to attend were mostly based around open-source projects. There were many demonstrations going on during the event such as the Car Ibeo LUX which was an autonomous system demonstration, the Nanogram demonstration competition, simulated 2D and 3D Robocup Soccer and Rescue Leagues, RoboCup at home showing the human-machine interaction with autonomous robots in daily life, Mixed Reality robotics that is based on 2 cm tall robots operated on a horizontally mounted display, and even the Festo Hockey Challenge Cup that uses robots to play an ice hockey game. Of course, the different Soccer, Dance (Juniors only), and Rescue Leagues were competing throughout the event that lasted for about 6 days.

More information about this event can be found at its website www.robocup2009.org .I believe that my participation in this event was a valuable experience that is closely related to the research work I am undertaking with Prof. Sklar, who has been involved with RoboCup for several years. Being so close to the different leagues and their respective games allowed me to better understand the benefits of these types of event in robotics that promote research and education through innovation and challenge.