An impressive performance by the Bowdoin RoboCup team last weekend earned them a second place finish at the U.S. Open. They look to build off of this success as they prepare for the World Championships, which will be held in Germany this June.
The Northern Bites are a part of the Standard Platform League (SPL), in which teams compete using five humanoid robots on small, indoor fields. Because all of the teams use practically identical robots that operate completely autonomously, each team’s strengths are based almost entirely on software.
“The goal is by 2050 that a RoboCup team will play the FIFA World Champions using pure human rules in a regular game of soccer,” said Faculty Adviser and Professor of Computer Science Eric Chown. “So every year we make the rules a little bit more like our regular soccer rules—the field gets bigger, we have more robots, eventually we’re going to move outdoors.”
These changes present daunting challenges each year to the teams, forcing them to adapt their code and approach to the sport to accommodate the new rules.
This year the game changed from using a small orange ball to a regular black and white soccer ball. Previously the ball was usually the only orange item on the field, allowing many teams to identify it by its color. However, with various black and white objects surrounding the robots, from the robots themselves to goal posts and field lines, color becomes a much less reliable indicator. Thus for many teams, altering their ball detection techniques was the biggest challenge of this season.
“We’ve seen a lot of teams have trouble detecting the ball,” said aptain Megan Maher ’16. “Actually one of the reasons that the winning team, UT Austin Villa, won is because they had such a great ball detection method, so they wouldn’t lose it that often.”
While the team ultimately fell to a very strong University of Texas team in the championship match, their progression from a shaky 0-0 start to a 2-0 win against University of Miami in the semifinals made the weekend a definite success for the program.
“We started from a position this weekend where it didn’t seem like we could do anything and by the end of the weekend we had finished in second place,” said Chown. “The first half of the championship game was a legitimately great game. Our goalie had been spectacular, he’d made a couple of really great saves and our defense was really solid, we just weren’t getting any offense.”
“We definitely performed a lot better in our last game than in our first game,” said captain Nicole Morin ’16. “Which is good for us because it means we were really great at improving stuff in between games and identifying our weaknesses, which is what the U.S. Open is all about, finding where we need to grow for this summer.”
Looking ahead, the league is constantly pushing itself to achieve the seemingly impossible.
“When I was in graduate school, to get a robot to walk on two legs was almost unheard of and it certainly would involve several Ph.D.’s,” said Chown. “Now our robots walk, and if we’re going to continue to move forward towards real soccer, we need robots that can run. It’s hard to imagine right now since there are I think two robots in the world that have ever run and they’ve been the result of millions of dollars of research.”
The walk engines that control most of the robots are just one example of the numerous technological advancements RoboCup has prompted over the years. In the program’s 11-year history, Bowdoin has stepped up to these challenges at every point, even as one of the only completely undergraduate teams and one of the smallest schools in the SPL.
“Bowdoin students are the second best team in the United States right now. The biggest thing for me is showing Bowdoin students and also people at other schools that our students are capable of anything,” said Chown. “You give them an opportunity, and they will succeed at the same level as these graduate students from around the world who’ve had more training and have more time to work on this and everything else. To me, that’s the pinnacle of the RoboCup experience.