Robocup Team Darwin Wins

DARWIN TEAM - USA

VS

CIT BRAINS - JAPAN

TEAM DARWIN WINS!

The robots, whose name stands for “Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence,” resemble Astro-Boy and were particularly skilled at the throw-in competition, where a robot must pick up a soccer ball and throw it back onto the pitch.

They may not be able to "Bend it Like Beckham," but last week the pint-sized robots of Penn and Virginia Tech's Team Darwin dribbled, kicked, threw and blocked their way to first place in the Humanoid Kid Size competition at the 2011 RoboCup tournament in Istanbul, Turkey.

Penn Engineering team members who traveled to the competition included Seung-Joon Yi,Stephen McGill,  along with Jordan Brindza,Yida Zhang, Ashleigh Thomas,Nicholas McGill and Spencer Lee,, who are graduate and undergraduate students in the  Automation, General Robotics, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. Team members from Virginia Tech included  a Ph.D. student in the RoMeLa Lab,Jeakweon Han, and Taylor Pesek, an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering. For the competition Penn developed the software framework that provided each robot with artificial intelligence (AI). This AI guided the robots' walk, vision, and gameplay, among other things.