Its been seven years since the Korean soccer team made it to the semi-finals in the World Cup in 2002, yet that day of mad cheers is never forgettable in most Korean’s minds. Then we have the FIRA RoboWorld Cup in France in 1998, where a Korean team won over the Brazilian team 23 to nothing. In the history of regular soccer, Korea has never defeated a Brazilian team yet. But in the world of robot soccer, they have been soundly trounced. All credit goes to Professor Kim Jong-whan, the founder of RoboWorld who created something from nothing.
Everything from the size of the robotic soccer field to the entire system was a challenge in the beginning. “Since the robots were the ones who had to play soccer, we were faced with a difficulty to establish standardization,” the father of Robot Soccer recalled. The history began in 1995 when Professor Kim Jong-whan was invited to join a micro robot contest in Nagoya, Japan. Since he was notified of this contest only a month ahead of time and his team never had an experience in building robots, Dr. Kim drilled on it day and night without rest and has succeeded to create the Jin-Myung Robot. At the contest, this robot set the highest record of 52 seconds and won the contest. When Dr. Kim broke the record for the second time in a row, he envisioned starting a contest on his own.
“How can we use these robotic technologies to help them interact with each other and form a team was my major concern when I first began to envision a contest of our own,” Professor Kim added.
On August 20, the 14th Federation of Robot Soccer Association (FIRA) RoboWorld Cup final match was held at the Robot Science Future Hall of the Global Fair & Festival 2009 at Incheon, Korea.
Twenty two robots competed on a 4x2m rectangular soccer field and many audience memebers couldn’t take their eyes off them. The total game lasted only 7 minutes, but the audience was amazed by how fast the robot could move. The robots can move up to 5 meters per second. Among the 7 divisions in the RoboWorld Cup, the final match was the MiroSot division, where 7.5 centimeter tall box shaped robots compete.
The final match was between Team Socrates (Singapore) and Team E-Dragon (China). When the game was over, the score was 9:0. Team Socrates has beaten E-Dragon and kept their 5 year winning streak. Team ICRO from Sungkyunkwan University has lost to Team Socrates in tie-breakers in 2007 and 2008. Unfortunately, Team ICRO, ranked 2nd in the world, was not able to participate in this year’s RoboWorld Cup.
“The key is to quickly pass and make it into a goal when the opportunity arises. Other teams have improved so much this year and we were happy to compete against them,” said the team leader of Socrates after winning the championship in the MiroSot competition.
When sports met science, a whole new area opened up in the robotics industry. Since the RoboWorld Cup has started in Korea in 1996, one out of 51 countries is selected to hold the event each year. The 15th RoboWorld Cup will be held in India next year.
