RoboCup...can Edinferno reach the final?, Monday July 09 2012
A team of robots called Edinferno, designed by
researchers at The
University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, has reached
the 'RoboCup' quarter finals. We spoke to robotics lecturer
Dr Subramanian
Ramamoorthy...
Why have these robots been designed and what do they
do?
We're essentially building autonomous robots. We buy the
physical robots from a French company called Aldebaran Robotics and
then most of our work is on programming them to be autonomous and,
to some extent, artificially intelligent. We programme the robots
to perform a variety of tasks, ranging from walking in a stable
fashion to using vision to find objects and to locate their
position on pitch. Increasingly, our interest is in unstructured
environments. For instance, a typical home environment, such as one
where a small child lives and plays, is completely different from
highly structured settings like factories, and much more dynamic in
the way things change in the environment. We want our robots to be
able to adapt to such changing environments.
Why football?
Many exciting robotics applications – ranging from assistive
robots to automated cars – involve a combination of issues, ranging
from mechanics to computer vision to strategy at the level of a
team. Moreover, many of these applications involve a variety of
social issues. One way to make progress with this complex set of
issues is to pick a test tube problem that is amenable to detailed
analysis from multiple different angles, by a reasonably sized
research group. Football is one such experiment. The immediate and
tangible challenge of getting a team of robots to function reliably
for twenty minutes on pitch is a great way to test our progress in
developing a robot that can function in more challenging
environments.
What is RoboCup
and how do you feel about getting to the quarter
finals?
It's an international tournament that's been going since 1997.
The RoboCup organization has a board of trustees and an established
group of executive committees that draw on researchers from a wide
cross section of the international robotics community. The standard
platform league typically has 28 teams that enter from
well-established robotics and artificial intelligence research
groups from many major universities around the world. It's only our
second year in the competition so the fact that we've made the top
eight is encouraging.
What's your own background and your ultimate
goal?
I've been with the University of Edinburgh for five years.
Before that I got my PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. I also
used to be a research engineer with a US company called National Instruments. My ultimate goal is
really to understand how to make machines that are intelligent and
capable of interacting with an ever changing world with other
agents and people. What I want to build is a really adaptable and
intelligent machine that can operate in these kinds of
situations.
