Brooklyn College MetroBots Place Fourth in National Robotics Soccer Rivalry

The Brooklyn College MetroBots finished a very respectable fourth in the standings and ahead of rival Brown University at the RoboCup 2008 competition held May 24–27 in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Science Center, Professor Simon Parsons of the Computer and Information Science Department has reported.

Carnegie Mellon University, the host college, finished third by beating the ’Bots, 8–0, in the consolation game. The MetroBots reached the semifinals when Brown forfeited its match to the Brooklynites.

Bowdoin College, from Brunswick, Maine, defeated the University of Texas, Austin, in the final by a score of 2–1, taking this year’s U.S. championship. Bowdoin is the current world champion in this event.

This year’s successful three-day competition involved nine colleges and universities and highlighted advances in team robotics. The MetroBots did not make the final cut in last July’s RoboCup 2007 international competition at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

In addition to Professor Parsons, graduate students Rachel Adler and Arif  “Tuna” Ozgelen and undergraduates Marvin Charles, Faisal Chowdhury, and Alex Barkan served as team handlers for the competition. Joel Kammet could not make the trip to Georgia but rewrote code and made other fixes via remote connection from his home. Under the rules that govern these RoboCup competitions, the robots cannot physically be altered, but making changes to their software are allowable.

The five four-legged aibo robots manufactured by Sony that make up the MetroBots team are the size of ordinary housecats. They play on a field that measures five meters by seven meters.

“We enter these competitions to test how good we are,” said Parsons. “Here in our lab we have good even lighting that makes it eay to see the ball and the goals. In Pittsburgh we encountered lighting that was much more uneven. In the early rounds our robots were nearly blind. We had to alter their software so that they could see the ball and find the goals. By the later rounds they could, and we played much better.”

Parsons noted that the goal of the not-for-profit RoboCup Federation, which runs the competitions and was founded by hundreds of scientists from around the world in 1997, is “by 2050, to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.”