Virtual humanoid RoboCup workshops

by Lucy Smith

03 July 2020

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Action from last year: HULKs versus rUNSWift at RoboCup 2019. (Photo by JT Genter)

The 24th edition of RoboCup, due to take place in Bordeaux in late June, has been postponed until 2021. Obviously an event which centres on soccer matches between opposing teams of robots is something that cannot be recreated online. However, keen to do something in place of the annual extravaganza, the organisers laid on a virtual workshop for the RoboCup humanoid community. This provided a venue for teams to present updates, discuss ideas and solve problems.

The workshop took place from 25 to 28 June and included presentations, workshops and lightning talks. You can view the programme here. It was free of charge and open to all.

One of the presentations was given by Heinrich Mellmann, Anastasia Prisacaru and Matthias Kubisch and demonstrated their educational robot “Gretchen”. Currently at the prototype stage, this is an experimental humanoid robot and the team hope that it can be a versatile platform for education and research. All hardware, software and documentation is developed as open source. They have kept costs as low as possible making it accessible for students and researchers.

You can view the team’s presentation below:

Other topics covered over the course of the four days included technical details concerning the hardware and software, debugging tools, deep learning approaches and more.

This presentation by Hidde Lekanne Deprez covered Image domain translation with GANs: