Robo pup for the cup

The Robocup US Open has taken place at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in which students from universities around the world competed in events ranging from robot dog soccer to search-and-rescue operations.

RoboCup is an international project designed to promote research in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics and computational perception.

The competition sets researchers a range of problems that require the development of robots able to understand events, plan, cooperate and take action.

The contest comprises five events, four of which are football based, with the final one a search and rescue. The organisers believe football games provide researchers with a convenient testing environment for the robots.

One of the games at the cup, which took place last week, involved Segway-riding humans playing with robotic Segway team-mates in a two-on-two competition, while another was computer-simulated soccer.

But the main event proved to be robot dog soccer, which consisted of two teams of four computer-programmed Sony Aibos.