Wired Article on Robogames Soccer

[tempusmaster]

Wired News posted a good article on Robogames that mentions the modified Robonova's, Dan Albert, and the Playstation/ZigBee mods:

Robo-One-style soccer debuted in America at this Robot Games, with four national teams competing three-on-three with RoboNova-1 humanoids. Despite being plagued with falls and software resets, the games drew a large and enthusiastic crowd that cheered whenever the humanoids managed to kick a ball at all. The United States took top honors -- beating out the U.K., Columbia and Brazil. One attendee noted that "this was the only time the United States has beaten Brazil in anything soccer related."

The U.S. team may have had an advantage -- they owned the robots. Last month Embedded Systems developer Dan Albert took apart Playstation controllers and rebuilt them with Maxstream-donated ZigBee controllers to allow the human players to control the soccer humanoids the same way they control games. "The beauty of this is kids already know how to use the controller," he explains, but "instead of being virtual, it's real." Next year he plans to bring 20 robots and controllers, and much more sophisticated software.

For Albert, as with many of the roboticists who spoke to Wired News, events like RoboGames are about getting kids interested in science and technology. "You start kids out with entertainment, and they gravitate toward engineering as they want more control over their world," he says.

[Droidling]

Dan and Matt both worked long hours to get the robots ready for competition. Dan built the controllers, while Matt had the thankless job of trying to get the RN-1s to keep their footing on the piece wrinkled indoor/outdoor carpet that was being used as a soccer pitch.

Congratulations, and thanks to both of them.

Terry

[bauermech]

The U.S. team may have had an advantage -- they owned the robots.

I wish I owned $10,000 worth of robots!

Congratulations, and thanks to both of them.

Thank you! Although it was a lot of work... and got a little hectic sometimes, we had a ton of fun.