Mechanical exercise pays off for Irish robots

PENALTY shoot-out secures Irish soccer victory! No, it’s not an archive headline after Packie Bonner’s famous save against Romania in Genoa, but rather the story of an Irish team whose robots did the business to become the world’s best in China last week.

Giovanni Trapattoni might do well to take a few tips from the lads at National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM), whose knee-high Numanoids side beat steely opposition from 15 other countries at the RoboCup World Championship in Suzhou near Shanghai.

The two-a-side games involve two-legged robots — no jokes about the Irish defence, please — facing off on an indoor pitch about six metres long. There are no remote controls or joysticks, however, as the players are completely autonomous.

“The idea was that each team had to design the software to enable these robots with intelligence for the game,” explained team mentor Prof Rick Middleton of NUIM’s Hamilton Institute for applied maths.

“So we have to ‘train’ the robots to visually recognise the ball and the goal, for example, then to line up a shot and kick. It’s not quite World Cup pace but it’s almost as exciting to watch.”

Prof Middleton was joined for the week of games by Alex Buckley and Shekman Tang, who have just completed degrees in electronic engineering and computer science, respectively.

With help from their colleagues at Prof Middleton’s former employers at University of Newcastle in Australia, they managed to beat teams from Spain, Mexico, Chile, the United States and Germany to reach the final.

“After 20 minutes neither side scored, so it was down to penalties. There’s no goalkeeper but each side is timed in how long before they can score,” he said.

The Irish talent came to the fore, with the Georgia Tech-Carnegie Mellon team from the US taking five minutes to push the ball over the line, compared to a 10-second conversion for the Numanoids.

“We did manage a celebration afterwards, although the robots didn’t come for pints,” said Prof Middleton.

While most of it was fun and games, the experience could help the team develop technology for a variety of uses, including microscopic tracking of cells.