

How an Australian team won the robot soccer world championships - bootload
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/how-an-australian-team-won-the-robot-soccer-world-championships-20150806-gitl5s.html

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shalmanese
UNSW has always fielded a strong robotics team, ever since the start of the
robocup competition: [http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/about-us/help-resources/for-
stude...](http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/about-us/help-resources/for-
students/student-projects/robocup/)

They were either first or second the first 5 years of the competition and have
generally stayed at the top of the rankings every year.

What's fascinating about Robocup is that each team releases the source code to
their robots at the end of each competition, which means each team essentially
starts at an equal position every year. What differentiates top performers is
their ability to innovate and improve every year.

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furyg3
If the robots are all the same, why are the aussie's robots so much faster? Do
they take more of a risk on balance?

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svalorzen
The code is not the same; behaviours and inverse kinematics are pretty much
never the defaults (they suck). So each team tries to work on things its
members are good at, and it seems Australians are particularly good at that.

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svalorzen
Ask an ex-member of the Dutch Nao Team anything =)

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boomzilla
What's the current state of team strategies implemented in this competition?
Every robot going for the goal on its own? Simple passing forwards? Blocking?
Double team on the ball carrier? What's the most number of intended passes in
sequence that a team carries out in practice?

Thanks.

~~~
svalorzen
In general, afaik, team strategies are not really developed in depth. This is
simply because actually governing the robots is exponentially harder than
anything else, and a robot that does not know where it is on the field, where
the ball is or is unable to move is also useless - no matter what advanced
tactic you decide to deploy. And these are REALLY hard problems!

Other problems are: understand which side of the field is actually yours (it's
not uncommon to do autogoals, since the field is visually symmetrical), how to
understand where you are after a referee repositions you, how to distinguish
friendly robots from adversaries, not fall down every five seconds.

And still the game is driven by simple hardware physics: the robots engines
tend to overheat very often, which basically results in the robots "melting"
on themselves since they can't support their weight for very long. And there
how much money a team has to spend comes into play heavily..

So to get back at your questions, not much. In general if you can shoot in the
general direction of the enemy's goal more often than your adversaries, you
will probably win =)

