RoboCup 2024: Sapienza is the only Italian team in the Standard Platform League.
The Baraonda News, l’informazione del litorale magazine reports on the RoboCup (Eindhoven, July 17-21) experience of Valerio, 24, and Eugenio, 23, two young engineers from Cerveteri who are part of Team SPQR from the “Antonio Ruberti” Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering at Sapienza University of Rome. Both of them have a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.
Eugenio, at his first world cup experience, and Valerio, who participated once before, use a very simple and direct language that anyone can understand. At the same time, however, they transmit how robotics brings together passion, fun, and commitment both in terms of studying and working together.
“The experience was beautiful. It allowed us to witness many different realities and to learn and have fun, too. We are a serious and hard-working group, and this made all the difference. Personally, I learned a lot since I’ve been on the team. I have acquired practical notions that I probably could not have learned elsewhere,” Eugenio explains to journalist Giorgio Ripani.
And Valerio explains why a football competition was chosen to accelerate the development of robotics and AI. “Since AI has become commonplace, I mean since 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue beat the world chess champion, it was the first time mankind was defeated by a computer. Chess is a static game and easier for a computer to analyse. However, football is completely different. There are obstacles, adversaries, and dynamic perceptions. The ball is constantly moving. One can fall over and lose perception of what’s going on. Football is popular, but very hard to play with robots. It’s as if the robots were empty and we had to give them working methods to play. And it’s not a simple game. We do this for research. Every year the league stimulates teams to find new ways of developing this issue. Every team participates not only on the pitch, but also through the submission of publications that are then illustrated at a dedicated RoboCup conference. It’s not just a football game per se.”
Due ragazzi di Cerveteri ai mondiali di robotica (in Italian)
Baraonda News, L’informazione del litorale
July 26, 2024
