Local Brisbane schools are hoping to emulate their 2003 success in the largest robotics competition for primary and high school students held in Queensland.
The University of Queensland will play host to more than 200 teams during the 2004 RoboCup Junior Australian Open and Queensland Championships at the UQ Centre, Union Road, St Lucia campus from September 4 to 5 between 9am and 5pm.
Robotics expert and senior lecturer at UQ’s School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) Dr Gordon Wyeth said many of the teams had been preparing all year for the competition and were looking forward to the high-tech challenges.
School teams will be attending from across Australia in the hope of being crowned the Australian RoboCup champions.
They will compete in five categories: Soccer, Open Rescue, Premier Rescue, Dance and Open Dance.
“For young students RoboCup Junior provides an exciting introduction to the field of robotics,” Dr Wyeth said.
“It offers a new way to develop technical abilities through hands-on experience with electronics, hardware and software and provides a highly motivating opportunity to learn teamwork skills.”
In 2003 Brisbane schools won five of the seven events. Brisbane Grammar School won the Premier Rescue and Open Rescue categories while Kimberley Park State School won the Junior Dance competition and went on to compete in the international competition in Portugal.
The budding engineers will be spurred on knowing their UQ heroes the RoboRoos Soccer Team made the final of the Robot Soccer World Cup competition in July, where they won silver and were narrowly defeated 2-1 by the Freie University of Berlin.
The team was made up of UQ PhD student David Ball and engineering students Monte MacDiarmid and Stephen Nuske.
Dr Wyeth said the purpose of RoboCup was to foster Artificial Intelligence and robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies could be integrated and examined.
“The ultimate goal of RoboCup is that by the middle of the 21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall play and win a soccer game against the human world champions,” he said.
In 2001 the School of ITEE established a resource centre to enable Queensland schools to participate in the RoboCup Junior Competitions.
The school provides workshops for school students and teachers where they can learn how to build and program robots, giving them the skills to compete in RoboCup Junior. Each year the School also makes a number of kits available for loan to schools.
Dr Wyeth said the upcoming generation would develop the technologies of the new millennium and robotics would very likely be a key technology.
“RoboCup Junior is all about learning the technical and teamwork skills that will lead young Australians to the forefront of the next technology revolution,” he said.
The winners will be eligible to compete in the 2005 RoboCup Junior World Cup competition in Osaka, Japan.
Online registration for RoboCup 2004 is now open, visit: www.robocupqld.net.au
Media: For more information or photos, contact ITEE Activities Officer Lynne Launt (telephone 07 3365 4195, email: lynne@itee.uq.edu.au) or Dr Wyeth (telephone 07 3365 3770, email: wyeth@itee.uq.edu.au) or Chris Saxby at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2479, email: c.saxby@uq.edu.au).
