FIRA 2012 Robot World Cup to be hosted by the Bristol Robotics Lab

We're all very excited because FIRA (the Federation of International Robot soccer Association), which runs an annual competition for robot soccer (and other robot sports), has awarded the 2012 event to the Bristol Robotics Lab. The 2010 event was held in Bangalore, India: check here for the web pages with 2010 results and some terrific videos. This year FIRA 2011 will be in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

FIRA 2012 will run from 20 - 25 August 2012, just a week or so after London 2012. Alongside FIRA 2012 will be two robotics conferences: the FIRA Congress and TAROS 2012 (Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems). Here is the (under development) FIRA-TAROS 2012 web site. Here is the joint University of Bristol, UWE press release announcing the event.

The FIRA robot world cup games currently fall into 7 categories and each category is defined by the type of robot and, typically, has its own set of rules. The first six categories are all real physical robots, the 7th - SimuroSot - is all in simulation. Here's a brief summary of the 6 real robot categories with links to the full descriptions and rules on the FIRA web pages.

• HuroSot is the main category for bipedal (walking and running) humanoid robots. It is also the most comprehensive category - in addition to soccer the category includes competitions for basketball, wall climbing, weight lifting and marathon running. HuroSot robots can be up to 130cm in height, and weigh up to 30kg. We will be entering a Bristol team for HuroSot. Here are some nice videos of HuroSot competitions in 2009.
• Amiresot is a simple one-a-side soccer game for the small Amire wheeled robot, which must be fully autonomous with its own vision system. AmireSot robots play with a yellow tennis ball.
• MiroSot is the Micro Robot soccer game for wheeled robots. It's a three-a-side game (one player can be a goalkeeper), in which an external vision system tracks the position of robots - and the ball - and an external computer system computes and relays moves to the robots. Robots cannot be larger than 7.5cm x 7.5cm x 7.5cm and they play with an orange golf ball. Here is a page with a video of a 2009 MiroSot game.
• NaroSot is similar to MiroSot but with smaller wheeled robots (4cm x 4cm x 5.5cm) and is a five-a-side game. NaroSot robots play with an orange ping-pong ball.
• AndroSot is a three-a-side game for fully autonomous 'android' robots between 30 and 60cm in height. Here is a video of a 2009 AndroSot game. 
• RoboSot is a game for larger wheeled robots (20cm x 20cm x any height). It's a three-a-side game and the robots must use on-board vision, although computation may be off-board. RoboSot robots play with a yellow/green tennis ball.

Here are some of the robots entered in past competitions (from the FIRA web pages):

HuroSot

MiroSot

NaroSot

RoboSot