The 16th Robocup and Symposium were held in Mexico City from 18th through 24th June 2012. The Wright Eagle team of USTC won the award in Free Challenge and took the second place in Simulation 2D of RoboCupSoccer. It is worth noting that the upgrade of their service robot "Kejia", which was honored Top 5 once again, has the unique Chinese appearance of world's Top 5 so far.
The RoboCup robotic program is one of the significant projects sustainedly supported by the Project of Innovation in Postgraduate Education. With years of development, having graduates as core members, the Wright Eagle team of USTC has won lots of titles and awards in a series of domestic and international competitions. At present, this program has developed into an important base of graduate innovative education, as a benchmark of mutual promotion of scientific research and talent development in the field of robot intelligence of China.
RoboCup@Home is one of the three major competition domains in RoboCup Leagues, aimed to develop service and assistive robot technology with high relevance for future personal domestic applications. The competition of RoboCup@Home consists of 9-10 benchmark tests in three stages. The Stage I includes 5 tests, for hot issues of autonomous service robot; the Stage II has 4 tests for the growth points or critical difficulties; at last it's the finals where 5 teams with highest scores can perform in the scenario that has been set up. The score of first two stages is the sum total of points on the various tests. The final score consists of two parts, 50% are determined by previous performance during the competition in first two stages, the other half comes from the evaluation of demonstration by both a league-internal and a league-external jury. USTC won the second prize in RoboCup@Home last year. According to the new development strategies, this year the focus should be the shift from conceptual design to home-grown research over the hardware of "Kejia" robot. With the support of the USTC Major Direction Project, the "Kejia B1" prototype, which is developed and manufactured by ourselves, has completed. Around it the research of all the software and hardware systems of "Kejia B1" robot has been fulfilled.
This year RoboCup@Home had 9 tests that were increasingly in difficulty, most teams failed to score in some tests. For example, in clean-up test all the teams got no points except USTC and University of Bonn. The Wright Eagle team kept second place in Stage I and Stage II. In the next Open Challenge, as the problem of competition program led to disorders play, the team finally was fourth and University of Bonn retained the championship. It was the second time that USTC team got into the world's top 5 and it was also the only Top 5 team of China. The home-grown "Kejia B1" robot passed 7 rigorous tests and the main technical specifications had greatly surpassed "Kejia A1" and "Kejia A2" robots that made a key step in the practical application of "Kejia" robot.
RoboCup 2D Simulation is a basic research program mainly focused on decision making, cooperation and confrontation. It was established by IJCAI (the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) in 1997, as a challenging issue in the AI field for next 50 years. USTC team played well in this competition and got the second place. A Japanese team, last year's runner-up, won the title. Until now, the team of USTC has stayed in the top two for 8 years in this competition, including three champions and five runner-ups.
In the Free Challenge competition, the Wright Eagle team won the first prize. Free Challenge is just newly set up this year, with paper-rating-like evaluation but required that theoretical results must be verified in RoboCup 2D Simulation. Its criteria include qualified theory and technique, innovativeness and correlated expectations in Simulation 2D and RoboCup. For one of the most significant fundamental matters in Multiple Agent System, belief state estimation, the USTC team proposed a P-MC algorithm with great performance and further potential and finally won the top score.
The annual RoboCup and Symposium are founded in Japan in 1997. All the stages of the competition are content with the forefront in various fields of autonomous robot. Based on the latest advances, the difficulty of the competition is raised gradually to keep forward and challenging. Part of the project performs in reality or virtual realistic environment to explore the critical issues in engineering application, promoting the translation of related research results. So, it's of important significance for the innovation capacity of graduates to participate in this international robotics competition. This participation is sponsored by the Project of Innovation in Postgraduate Education of USTC.
