RoboCup Junior Australia Competitions

Registrations
Dates and Locations
Latest Rules

Dance
Rescue
Soccer
Competition Equipment

What is RoboCupJunior?

RoboCupJunior is a project-oriented educational initiative that sponsors local, regional and international robotic events for young students. It is designed to introduce RoboCup to primary and secondary school children, as well as undergraduates who do not have the resources to get involved in the senior leagues. The focus in the junior league is on education.

RoboCup is an international effort whose purpose is to foster Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. As well, the initiative serves as a basis for project-oriented education.

The ultimate goal of RoboCup is that by the middle of the 21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall play (and win!) a soccer game against the (human) world champions.

RoboCup Junior has been developed with three levels of increasing complexity where students can choose to take up the challenge at their own skill and interest level. The three levels consist of RoboCup Junior Dance, Rescue and Soccer.

RoboCup Junior Dance

The RoboCup Junior Dance is a stunning integration of Science, Technology and the Arts. Participants program their robots to dance to music. Competitors are encouraged to decorate their entries and to motorise robot limb movements, to give their robots real personality.

RoboCup Junior Dance can be approached in a number of ways with creative new ideas appearing every year. Some previous ideas have been robots dancing together in tightly choreographed teams, students interacting with their robots while they were dancing, students creating their own music to dance to and students telling a story while the robots act it out to the music.

The Dance Challenge is a real team effort where students are can design their own t-shirts, prepare themselves for the team interview and create their costumes, on top of the programming and building.

RoboCup Junior Rescue

Artificial intelligence at its best! The Rescue competition mirrors the real life use of robots that rescue people from life-threatening situations.

In Junior rescue, Robots compete by following a winding line on a series of tiles to a designated rescue area. On the way the robot could encounter obstacles, bridges and short cut opportunities that will challenge the most intrepid programmer. After negotiating the randomly selected path, the robot arrives at a green coloured area which indicates a chemical spill. While the clock is still ticking the robot must find "the victim" before pushing them out of the quicksand to safety.

Premier rescue involves the same tiles as Junior Rescue, however, this time the robots can encounter some extra tiles including "speed bumps" and the challenging "gridlock". Once in the chemical spill, the Premier rescue robot is required to find and lift the victim out to the safety of a raised platform. A true test of a robot designers ability!

In 2007 we introduced a new rescue challenge. The rescue field is now based on a modular 594mm square tile which we can use to make an endless number of different coures for your robots to traverse and also provides us with the ability to add new tiles in the future. We are also introducing a 3rd dimension to the course with bridges, speed bumps and obstacles.

You can download the new rules and tiles designs from the rules section. If you have any questions or suggestions please email us here

RoboCup Junior Soccer

Students are required to design and program two robots to compete against an opposing pair of robots by kicking an infra-red transmitting ball into their designated goal. Teams have a choice of using two attacking robots or an attacker teamed with a goalie.

The field is the size of a table tennis table and is graded from black to white, to allow the robots to use downward facing light sensors to ascertain which way to kick. Due to its ease of introduction to the uninitiated, most students choose to use LEGO Mindstorms to build and program their robots. Although the LEGO Mindstorms set can continue to be very competitive while being modified to high degree of complexity, other students select alternative platforms and even build their own microprocessor robots from basic electronic components. A range of sensors can been attached to all of the robotic platforms. These include: electronic compasses, sonar, modified light sensors and motor rotation sensors.

Official RoboCup Junior Competition Equipment

Roboball Mk2, the Advanced Roboball Sensor and Compass Sensor are available from the manufacturer and RoboCup Junior Australia partner Wiltronics

The following items are also available from Modern Teaching Aids.

	RCJA Roboball MKII		RCJA Advanced Roboball Sensor
	RCJA Roboball Compass Sensor		The RoboBall FlyEye Sensor. More info

Official RCJA Grey Scale

Official RCJA CD