This year’s FIRA (Federation of International Robosoccer Association) Robo World Cup was held in Singapore between 10 and 17 of December. For those who are the fans of robotic soccer should remember well that TKU won the championship two years ago. This year, TKU teams did not win any gold, but still managed to shine despite intense competition from other 82 teams (of 16 countries), by winning a silver in the RoboSot category, and the fourth place in the HuroSot (Humanoid robotic soccer) category.

TKU teams for various categories have been traditionally made up by the professor, Wong Ching-chang and his students from the Department of Electrical Engineering. With the full support of the university, these teams have won several international and national top awards throughout the years. However, at the 2005 World cup, it was Singapore and China who came out as the top winners. TKU teams were as good as always, but with more teams playing than any previous year this time, it was already quite an accomplishment for TKU to have come this far with their results. More competition aside, some of the tournaments this year also tightened the size of robots, which made the technology behind it even more challenging for TKU.

Competition and tighter rules will only spur TKU to improve and innovate its robotic technology even further. In fact, such a technology gets a boost every year. For example, TKU’s robots in Robosot category this year are already much smaller, more precise and mobile than those of last year, according the captain of the Robo Soccer TKU Team, Lee Shih-an. He said that the circuits, motor and the wheels of all their robots had been upgraded this time. Nonetheless, his team lost to China due to some technical fault at the last moment. He is not discouraged and is already working on plans of redesigning their robots to capture next year’s championship title.

As for humanoid robotic technology used in the HuroSot tournament, it was even more mind-blowing when seeing the progress in this kind of human-like robots. Huang Kai-hsiang, TKU captain of HuroSot team, believes that the competition in this kind of tournament will become steeper and steeper year by year as more teams are interested in playing it. But this is a good thing. It will make those robotic players to be more human-like—in other words, better looking. It won’t be long before we can have a robotic Beckham playing for TKU!

UPDATE： 2010/09/27 CLICKS： 1249 DOWNLOADS：