RoboTeam Twente Qualified for World Championship Robot Soccer
RoboTeam Twente will participate in the highest level robot soccer competition, the RoboCup 2020. Starting at the 23rd of June in Bordeaux, France, the team will try to become world champion in the Small Size League. This qualification means that Twente is once again represented in the highest division in this category.
Saxion is represented by Timo van der Kuil (Applied Computer Science) and Carina Campisi (Creative Media & Game Technologies). Timo is software developer and Carina is responsible for the public relations.
World’s best
Qualification for the tournament means that the students from Twente belong to the best teams in the world. This is because there are strict requirements for participating in the RoboCup. All partaking teams need to show what they are capable of, but they need to describe what this year’s improvements to the robot and software will be as well. It is not enough to merely solve last year’s shortcomings, teams are required to actually innovate.
One of the challenges that the team is currently working on, is the cooperation between the robots. By optimizing the software, the robots can be controlled faster and more accurately, making them able to play even better as a team.
Casper de Regt, team manager of RoboTeam Twente, is enthusiastic: “The fact that we are qualified once again, shows that our innovations are of a high level. It also makes clear that The Netherlands and the region of Twente play an important and international role in the development of robotics and artificial intelligence.”
The RoboCup
The RoboCup is an international conference for robotics and artificial intelligence, where the World Championship for robot soccer takes place as well. The objective of the RoboCup is to create a team of humanoid robot soccer players that can win a soccer game against the human World Champion by 2050.
To realise this plan, several different categories of robot soccer have been established, each focussing on a different aspect of the challenge. The category in which RoboTeam Twente participates, addresses the tactics and cooperation of the robots. The software that is developed for this purpose, is comparable to the coach of a human soccer team, who decides what the best strategy for the team is. RoboTeam Twente will compete against teams from Japan, Iran, Germany and China.
About RoboTeam Twente
RoboTeam Twente is an initiative of students of University of Twente and Saxion University of Applied Sciences, which focuses on building soccer robots and its software. The team consists of sixteen students from various studies, from mechanical engineering to computer science. A part of the team members puts their study on halt for one year, to completely focus on the development of the robots. RoboTeam Twente has achieved good results in the previous editions of the RoboCup, among which a 5th place in 2019.