RoboCupJunior 

RoboCupJunior is a project-oriented educational initiative that supports local, regional and international robotic events for young students up to the age of 19. It is designed to introduce RoboCup to primary and secondary school children, as well as undergraduates who do not have the resources to get involved in the senior leagues of RoboCup. The focus of RCJ is on education.

RCJ stands apart from other robotics programs for young students for several reasons. First, RCJ is focussed more on education than competition. Second, the RCJ challenges remain the same from one year to the next, providing a scaffolded learning environment in which students can develop more sophisticated solutions as they grow and expand their knowledge. Third, the RCJ challenges -- soccer, rescue and dance -- are familiar; spectators can watch and understand what they are observing, without needing explanations of complicated rules. Fourth, RCJ delves more deeply into computer science and programming due to its emphasis on autonomous robots. Fifth, RCJ sits at the entry-level of the international RoboCup initiative, which is strongly committed to education and involvement of young people in technology.

Overall schedule:

RobotDemos 2009

What is this?

This is a mini workshop, within RoboCup Junior, for discussing new ideas concerning our regular junior competitions (Dance, Rescue, and Soccer) and also to demonstrate robotic projects being developed at schools, clubs, community centers and other such places offering informal education and opportunities in robotics.

When will this be?

RobotDemos 2009 will take place on Saturday 4th of July, at 18h00, on the main Dance stage, in Graz, of course!

Program:

• • Rescue v2 - The new approach
  • Tiago Caldeira, University of Coimbra, Portugal
  • Ashley Green, Open University, UK
    • A few ideas for a new Rescue competition
• • Educational robotics platforms at Robotika.SK
  • Pavel Petrovic, Association Robotika.SK, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University of Bratislava, Slovakia
    • Robotics.SK is an association in Slovakia that is involved in organizing multiple robotics contests - Istrobot, RoboCup Junior, FIRST LEGO League. We also develop various robotics educational platforms for all ages that we would like to demonstrate to you.
• • The Having of Wonderful Ideas
  • Amy Eguchi, Bloomfield College, NJ, USA
    • Have you had students excited about a brilliant idea of a new robot but that could not fit in any of robotics competitions that you can think of? This presentation will explore the wonderful ideas that children have and make them into possible new projects.
• • Multi-National European RoboCup Project
  • Ricardo Sampaio, Sónia Santos, Eduardo Pinto, Escola Profissional, Gustave Eiffel, Amadora, Portugal.
  • 1 student per participating school (from all over Europe)
    • What are the Comenius Projects and our experience during the present project GEN II Euro Soccer Robot and the last one Robotica, Robotics, Robotik: Our way to the Future

      Presentation of the students experience in the project. This part of the presentation will be done and presented by some of the students. Some of them will be present in RoboCup competitions and others only as visitors. Presented by Sónia Santos.

      Technical presentation and demo. We will show how we can interface non commercial electronic boards as the one we are developing in this project with an NXT kit from Lego. We will do a demo where one of our projects that will compete in dance will be controlled by a NXT. This robotics plataform has a diameter of 1.3m and is capable of transporting more than 150Kg. The NXT will be radio controlled via Bluetooth with a HTC mobile phone. We will use the acceleration sensor in the mobile phone to control the robot as in a Wii console. The presentation will also cover the characteristics of the generic board that could be use in lots of robotics application related with the RoboCup Junior competitions. In intention of this project to make all the info of the board to be public on website for the RoboCup community. Presented by Ricardo Sampaio.

• • Next generation soccer robot's specification and educational goals depends in the 2009 Field Ver.B rules
  • Tairo NOMURA, Saitama University, Japan
  • and some Japanese Field B teams
    • In the new international soccer rules of RoboCupJunior 2009 there are some drastic/big changes especially 1)colored goals, 2)no walls at each end line and side line. One more important on-going discussion of changes is about the ball specification. RoboCupJunior international TC have already announced new ball specification and will announce the official plan (road map) of changing ball specification toward 2010 in Graz.

      For colored goals, already in 2008 Suzhou international competition, one german team used the vision sensor to find colored goals in GEN II games. Also in JapanOpen2009, two teams used the vision system and seemed that these robots worked well in Field version B rules.

      This short report tries to illustrate one possibility of next generation RoboCupJunior soccer robot's specifications, and of educational goals that we will give the junior learners according to the new rules.

• • Building cheap sensors for the new pulsed RCJ soccer ball
  • Luis Almeida, University of Porto, Portugal
    • The new ball specification was defined to allow compatibility with common infra-red light remote control receivers used in home appliances. These are cheap electronic components that can be be easily found in any electronics dealer.

      In this presentation we will explain how use these components to build effective sensors for soccer robots that detect the new modulated ball.