Penn team takes first place in International RoboCup competition

In the Netherlands, 8 a.m. arrives when night owls on the East Coast are just tucking in — around 2 a.m. But when Penn’s Team DARwIn went to the international RoboCup competition last month, that’s when their days started.

“It was stressful. It was sleep-depriving. But, above all, rewarding,” rising College sophomore Christopher Akatsuka said of his experience in Eindhoven, the Dutch city where the competition was held.

“We went into the competition area as soon as the venue opened — 8 a.m. — and left when it closed at 11 p.m. Granted, there was still a little daylight at 11 p.m. for some strange reason, but not much,” Akatsuka added.

Team DARwIn’s early-morning efforts paid off. The team took home the blue ribbon in the category of kid-sized humanoids in RoboCup Soccer.

The first RoboCup tournament was held in 1997 as a robotics competition with one lofty goal — the development of robot soccer players which would by 2050 be able to defeat the human World Cup champions.

Today, its annual international competition attracts roboticists, experienced and aspiring, from all over the world. Penn’s final match pitted the team against one from Tehran, Iran, and before that the team defeated contenders from Mexico, Indonesia and Germany.

The robot matches are harrowing, making up for what they lack in athletic suspense with the pure thrill of seeing wires, transistors and gears score goals. Each team in the kid-sized league fields three autonomous robots, each robot about half a meter tall. The robots stumble, crash and get confused, but through some magic of programming or luck, eventually kick a ball into the goal.

The road to the international competition was a long one. For the team’s newest additions, like Akatsuka and rising Engineering sophomore Alan Aquino, that road began in January.

“They put us through a two month bootcamp … from January to March. Assignments were due once a week and every night we’d listen to lectures prepared for us,” Aquino said. In the bootcamp, the RoboCup hopefuls were trained in programming and hands-on work with the robots.

“It’s a very minor programming language,” Aquino laughed about the main tool of robotics, Lua. “There aren’t many more uses for it other than this and ‘World of Warcraft’ scripting.”

There wasn’t much expected of the newcomers. Aquino admitted that he did not have any robotics experience until getting involved with DARwIn, and Akatsuka said he only had “basic proficiency in Java.”

To make up for this, the learning curve was steep. “It really started to ramp up towards the end,” Aquino said.

“Academics came first, the team came second and everything else followed,” Akatsuka added.

In April, the team traveled to Bowdoin College in Maine for the national competition — the RoboCup U.S. Open. For Aquino and his fellow neophytes, the national competition was a good primer on what competition at Eindhoven would be like.

“You know PennApps hackathon? This is the same deal,” he said. “Over the course of three days, I slept about six hours.”

That kind of dedication earned Penn top place at Bowdoin, and assured Aquino and Akatsuka a spot on the international team. The undergraduates took internships in the GRASP laboratory — General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception — to facilitate the cost and logistics of getting to Europe in the summer.

The team began competition on June 27, a rainy Thursday. “Eindhoven was a lot of the same,” Aquino said, comparing it to the Bowdoin competition. “It’s a whole lot of experimentation, really.”

The undergraduates performed in the Standard Platform category, a set of matches where each team has the same robot. “It’s mostly a test of software,” Aquino commented. There, they won in their first match but were defeated in the intermediate round.

Meanwhile, the graduate students performed in the kid-sized humanoid category. Penn’s team went undefeated, reaching the finals on June 30.

Samarth Brahmbhatt, a graduate student in the robotics program in the School of Engineering, and a first timer to the world of RoboCup, was excited at the prospect of competing.

“It definitely has been exciting. This was my first year in RoboCup, so we got to learn what other teams think, what they think about the whole thing. It was really fun,” he said.

Brahmbhatt pointed out that this year, the competition was stiffer than he expected.

“We had to work harder than other years. The ultimate aim of this is to forward research, so we don’t have any secrets from the other teams. This year, a couple of teams had taken our code and our strategies and improved themselves.”

“We also had hardware problems with some robots … but we had a couple of people who were good with working on the hardware,” Brahmbhatt said.

Daniel Lee, director of the GRASP lab and a professor in electrical engineering who also advises the team, said that their victory “shows that Penn students are right on the cutting edge of robotics research,” he said.

“They were able to successfully compete against much larger and better funded teams from the U.S. and around the world,” he added.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.