Soccer Team Expects RoboCup Gold

Posted by Jonathan in GENERAL on 06-14-10    No Comments


Here’s a World Cup soccer match that ESPN won’t be jumping all over to hype.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting that the robot soccer team out of Carnegie Mellon University has high hopes for this year’s 2010 RoboCup going on in Singapore later this year.

Contestants certainly won’t be facing any vuvuzelas in the audience. (For the uninitiated, those are those loud, annoying horns they sell at all the stadiums that make watching World Cup games sound like you’ve got a beehive in your living room).

Robot soccer is  played with 5-inch cylinders that are lucky to move at a walking pace. And the fan base is, how shall we say, limited. But still the CMDragons are adopting a “hate the game, not the playa’” vibe. Team management was quoted as saying there is no reason why CMDragons team should not flat out win. And the operation is relying on a secret algorithm that will give their bots the edge in scoring.  But all is not as it seems in the CMDragons camp: Last year, their bots went blind when a program pulled a Bill Buckner and crashed.

So plenty of work remains.



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