Engineers build robots to search, rescue, play soccer

By 2050, robotics engineers want to develop a team of robots that can beat the human world… By 2050, robotics engineers want to develop a team of robots that can beat the human world champions of soccer.

Researchers from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University participated in the annual RoboCup this July in Osaka, Japan, where they joined with other engineers to develop the technology for this future team of soccer-playing robots.

They also promoted artificial intelligence, robotics and other related fields, including urban search-and-rescue technology.

Michael Lewis, an associate professor in Pitt’s Department of Information Science and Telecommunications, and other researchers demonstrated their virtual environments in the Urban Search and Rescue competition – a separate competition in RoboCup that supports software research for search-and-rescue technology.

“It’s not as automated as people think,” Lewis said, referring to the perception that robotics for USAR simply involves computers and robots.

“There’s a lot of human input, because [engineers] have to look through the camera to tell the robot what to do.”

Lewis’ efforts to develop virtual hazardous environment simulators help engineers who build human-controlled, search-and-rescue robots.

“We were working for rescue robots. We’re interested in multi-robot cooperation,” he said.

In addition to the international RoboCup, American researchers can participate in the annual RoboCup US Open, a regional event to support RoboCup research in the Americas.

Hosted at Georgia’s Institute of Technology, the RoboCup US Open gave Lewis and his colleagues a chance to present their simulators in the urban search-and-rescue and real robot leagues, where they won first place for autonomy and mobility.

Overall, the team won third, though, for search and rescue.

“We’d always like to be first in everything,” he said, but added that because of a catastrophe with some disabled robots, they could only take third place.

Beyond these accomplishments, their simulator gave them more recognition, especially from the RoboCup competition.

The RoboCup competition approved Lewis’s team, which means that RoboCup will use their simulator for future USAR research.

“We can get graphics that look like a real video screen,” Lewis said, explaining that numerous universities around the world – including the University of Rome, Ohio State University, other universities in Japan and a whole group of schools in Germany – use their simulator.

This simulator provides graphics that duplicate the problems real search-and-rescue robots face – a growing demand since recent urban attacks.