by Levi J Parsons
SYDNEY, July 4 (Xinhua) -- Some of the world's best robotics engineers, programmers and designers have descended upon Sydney on Thursday, for the first day of action at RoboCup 2019 - an international competition showcasing the cutting edge of robotics technology.
"We already have over 2,000 (competitors) and that's split between the major competition which is university research level and also the Junior competition for school kids," Chair of the RoboCup 2019 Organising Committee and long-time mentor to the University of New South Wales Sydney RoboCup teams, Professor Claude Sammut told Xinhua.
With strong representation from China and teams from over 40 countries around the world in attendance, Sammut said the competition will be fierce.
"China often does very, very well because in some of the league's, they're the top teams, and in others they're always competing in the finals," he said.
When the event was first held in 1997 in Japan, the tournament format only involved a robot soccer competition. But now there are numerous categories for a variety of different competitors.
"There are legged robots, small-wheeled robots, there are bigger-wheeled robots and they all exercise different things in computing and mechanical electrical engineering," Sammut said.
"There's also rescue robots that simulates a disaster site and the robots have to go in and look through, explore the area and find victims, and then there's at homes or domestic robot (competitions) as well as industrial robots."
Although the tournament is all about having fun, Sammut said competitors are here to win and focus on tackling "serious problems."
"The reason we have the competition is to drive the research... but hopefully in a fun way," he said.
"So with the rescue robots, we're actually being helped by the New South Wales State Police Rescue and Bomb Squad, and for them to be able to use robots in dangerous situations where they don't have to endanger their own people, that's really significant."
While the most well-known event, the robot soccer competition, may seem like a less important aspect of the robotics world, the technology being developed by competitors around the globe in these tournaments plays a pivotal role when it comes to solving complex manoeuvrability problems facing the wider industry.
"A lot of our competitors have gone on to work in companies doing self driving cars and we've also got people who work in surgical robots," Sammut said.
At the moment, Sammut explained the next big challenge for the industry is the race to design domestic robots that can help people around the house.
"One of the reasons we're doing these domestic robots is that all over the world we've got an ageing population and it's getting harder and harder and more expensive to try to maintain people's quality of life as they get older," he said.
"So getting the robots into the home is a really important thing for us to try to do. But it's very difficult because most of the time when we make industrial robots, their environments have been designed for the robots."
"But in the home it's designed obviously around people so we have to design the robots to work with people and that's a really challenging problem, but it's an important one to do."
The competition being held at Sydney's International Convention Center will wrap up on July 7.
