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German winners in Robo-Cup

April 1, 2012

Europe's largest robotics contest has been won in the household section by a student team from Bonn University. Their homely humanoid impressed jurors by watering flowers, offering snacks and rearranging furniture.

https://p.dw.com/p/14WA8
Bonn's service robot Cosero at work during the RoboCup GermanOpen 2012 in Magdeburg
Image: AP

Lead organizer of the Robo-Cup German Open staged in Magdeburg, Ansgar Bredenfeld said the Bonn team's robot exhibited "outstanding" software programming.

Another Robo-Cup contest among football robots from 12 European nations was won by a kicker robot "B-Human" from Bremen University. The title holder beat a National University of Ireland competitor, "RoboEireann", 8-0.

The rescue-robot contest went to inventors from Darmstadt's TU technical university. In this category the robots must negotiate and map an obstacle course to locate ostensibly injured persons.

Taking part were 800 students and young adults, including 150 school teams supported by teachers and parents. In total, 33 teams qualified for the the Robo-Cup world championships in Mexico in June. Preliminaries also take place in nations, such as Japan, Iran and Australia.

Honda Motor Co.'s revamped human-shaped robot "Asimo" kicks a soccer ball
The competition aims to stage a robot vs. human soccer match by 2050Image: dapd

The series was launched in 1997, initially to develop robots envisaged as eventually becoming capable of winning against a human world soccer champion team by 2050. Robo-Cup was expanded into four categories, including a Junior Robo-Cup.

Germanyaiming for robotics role in outer space

Last month, German government aerospace spokesman Peter Hintze declared Germany's intention to become a leading robotics nation for space missions.

Hintze said there were prospects for "incredibly growth," with almost unlimited commercial possibilities, also within the realms of medicine, maritime technology, manufacturing and transport.

Last month outside Trier Cathedral in western Germany, a one-armed robot finished copying the complete Bible by writing with an inked calligraphy tip more than 3.5 million characters on paper.

More than 1.3 million visitors watched "Robotlab", which was developed by an artistic team from Karlsruhe, steadily at work inside a glass container on the cathedral's forecourt, ahead of a major pilgrimage festival in April.

ipj/acb (epd, Reuters, dpa)