RoboCupRescue Win!

 
     
  Dr.Lewis and Jijun Wang

The Pittsburgh Steel Team – a partnership between the School of Information Sciences and CMU -- placed first in the RoboCupRescue Virtual Robots competition.  This competition was part of RoboCup 2007, held in Atlanta from July 3-10. 

The Pittsburgh Steel edged out teams from Germany’s Jacob's University (second place) and SPQR from the University of Rome (third place). This year's competition attracted nine teams from Europe and the Americas. The Steel led throughout the entire competition, which featured teams of simulated robots searching for victims in disaster environments.  CMU's Prasanna Velagapudi operated the robots while SIS’s own Jijun Wang, the simulator's developer, coded along side keeping the Steel a step ahead of the competition. 

The USARSim robotic simulation developed at SIS and used in this competition has now been downloaded from SourceForge more than 15,000 times and is being used by researchers around the world.  Congratulations to these victorious RoboCup 2007 competitors!

RoboCup is an international research and education initiative. Its goal is to foster artificial intelligence and robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be examined and integrated. The concept of soccer-playing robots was first introduced in 1993. In July 1997, the first official conference and games were held in Nagoya, Japan, followed by Paris, Stockholm, Melbourne, Seattle, Fukuoka/Busan, Padua, Lisbon, Osaka and Bremen.

This is only the second time that the RoboCupRescue Virtual Robots competition has been held as part of the RoboCup events.  At last year’s event, held in Bremen, the Steel didn’t place in the top three slots, but the organizers recognized the Steel Team for its inspiring user interface and Uva ResQ for their mapping software.

   

 
 

 

 

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