Irish roboplayers reach cup final

If the Irish team do as well as their robotic equivalent in the forthcoming European Championships, they will have achieved a brilliant result.

RoboEireann, a robotic team from NUI Maynooth, finished second in the German Open last month, the robotic technology equivalent of Euro 2012.

They were beaten in the final by three-times world champions, B-Human,  a project at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bremen.

The Irish team were displaying their wares to the public at a demonstration in NUI Maynooth this afternoon to coincide with the opening of Euro 2012.

Each team consists of four robots and the rules are similar to football. Robots can get sin binned and sent off.

The critical thing is the robots operate independently of human control so they have to be programmed to do all the things that normal footballers do using their internal software.

The ultimate goal is to have a robotic team capable of competing with their human equivalent by the middle of the century, but Dr Rudi Villing, team coach and lecturer in the NUI Maynooth electronic engineering department, said the challenges are formidable.

Dr Villing said there is a "very serious point" to robotic football as they are a fun way of presenting advances in robotic technology to the public.

"Essentially robotic football is a vehicle to solving the underlying autonomous robotic problems in a way that is entertaining to the public, engaging for students and provides a nice environment to test these problems," he said.

"We have a vision that in the future, as the population gets older, they will be in need of assistance. There won't necessarily be young people, care workers, to help with their everyday needs. Robots are a possible option."

Dr Villing said the robots biggest challenge is figuring out where they are on the pitch. "It's like closing one eye and looking through a tube for the other eye. You can see very little of what is going on."

A team of five works on the project in NUI Maynooth and each robot costs up to €5,000 to build.