The 12th FIRA RoboWorld Cup USA 2007 will be held on June 14 to 17, 2007 in San Francisco, USA. The event will be hosted by the Federation of International Robot-soccer Association (FIRA) and organized by the Robotics Society of America and San Francisco State University.
"To take the spirit of science and technology to the young generation and laymen, FIRA welcomes all the participants for FIRA RoboWorld Cup 2007 USA along with RoboWorld Congress,"said Kim Jong-hwan, professor at KAIST who serves concurrently as president of FIRA on the occasion of the 12th FIRA RoboWorld Cup USA 2007.
Concerning the objectives of the FIRA RoboWorld Cup, Kim enumerated: "This RoboWorld Cup is to promote the development of autonomous multi-agent robotic systems that can cooperate with each other and to contribute to the state-of-the-art technology improvement in this specialized field." Furthermore, this RoboWorld Cup also is to bring together skilled researchers and students from different backgrounds such as robotics, sensor fusion, intelligent control, communication, image processing and computer technology into a new and growing interdisciplinary field of intelligent autonomous soccer-robots to play the game of soccer.
The venue of the 12th FIRA RoboWorld Cup USA 2007 is Fort Mason's Festival Pavilion, San Francisco. FIRA World Congress 2007 will be held in conjunction with the FIRA Cup.
The Congress will review and discuss major advances in science and technology regarding robotics, according to Kim. Kim said that particular emphasis will be given to applications and developments in the area of entertainment, education, service and personal robots. This FIRA RoboWorld Cup 2007 includes a total of 6 regular events such as MiroSot, SimuroSot, RoboSot, Huro Cup, KheperaSot, and NaroSot and 1 pilot event AndroSot.
Micro Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament (MiroSot)'s game explanation is as follows. A match shall be played by two teams, each consisting of three robots, one of which can be the goalkeeper. Three human team members, a manager, a coach and a trainer only will be allowed on the stage. One host computer per team, mainly dedicated to vision processing and other location identifying, shall be used.
The size of each robot shall be limited to 7.5 cm cubed. The height of the antenna shall not be considered in deciding a robot's size.
SimuroSot consists of a server which has the soccer game environments and two client programs with the game strategies.
A 3D color graphic screen displays the match. Teams can make their own strategies and compete with each other without hardware. The 3D simulation platform for 5 vs 5 and 11 vs 11 games is available at FIRA web site.
A RobotSot match shall be played by two teams, each consisting of one to three robots. One of the robots can be the goalkeeper.
Three human team members only will be allowed on stage. The robots can be fully or semi-autonomous. In the semiautonomous case, a host computer can be used to process the vision information from the cameras on-board the robots.
The KheperaSot game shall be played by two teams, each consisting of one robot player and up two human team members.
The robot will be fully autonomous with on board vision system. The human team members will only be allowed to place their robot on the field, start their robot at the beginning of each round at the position indicated by the referee before each round, start their robot when indicated by the referee and remove the robot from the field at conclusion of the match.
