[patrickrd]

Tomorrow morning, I will be leaving to compete in the Robocup Small Size league in Padua, Italy. As one of only a few teams representing the United States (there are also teams from Ohio State and Carnegie Mellon), I hope to bring back the small size league champion cup! Cornell University has won the competition three of the past four years, defeating teams from all over the world. I would also like to point out that several members of our team were former FIRST team members in high school and very influential towards our successes! I will make every effort to post updates how the Cornell team is doing daily between July 3 and July 9.

For those interested, Robocup is an organization who's goal is to build a set of robots that can compete against and win against the World Cup soccer champions by the year 2050. At present, Robocup has several leagues set up to work towards this goal, the small-sized league being one of them. In the small sized league, five robots compete autonomously (no human control) against another team on a field slightly larger than a ping pong table.

In the four years Cornell has been involved, we have set the standard for mechanical design. In 2000, Cornell introduced an omni-directional drive system, allowing the robots to accelerate in any direction at any time, with any rotational velocity. Further, a dribbling system was introduced in 2001 that allows the robots to place a backspin on the ball, such that the ball is always accelerating towards the robot, regardless how the robot is traveling. Both innovations have set the standard, and today most every team has attempted to adapt the same technology.

Below you can find a list of links of interest relating to the competition, and a photo taken today of our eight 2003 robots before being packed.

Robocup 2003 Competition Site
Cornell's Robocup Site
Cornell Robocup Media Archive