I guess I do stuff in academia. It's not much but it's honest work. Just some basic stuff on Robots and in University. Hope it's interesting somewhat for you though.
| Table of Contents |
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| RoboCup |
| SPUR |
| Postgrad Work |
RoboCup is an international competition where several academics staff and students, get together to compete in different areas aiming to further the research into robotics. Originally started off with soccer, there are now different domains, and within these domains are different leagues you can participate in. From the domains of @home, industrial, junior, rescue, and soccer, I've only participated in soccer, and specifically the Standard Platform League (SPL for short).
The ultimate goal of RoboCup while progressing the area of robotics, has been to have robots being able to compete with the reigning FIFA world champions in soccer with the official FIFA ruleset by 2050. Currently we are halfway there and progress has been made. Within the soccer domain, there is the humanoid league that develop robots that resemble the structure of a human, and so have to deal with the constraints that we have with regards to movement, balance and the like.
Started in 2009, I've joined RoboÉireann since 2022, and have tried to be an active contributer to it til the present day. We're the only robocup team in Ireland, regardless of domain and league, originally NUmanoids when Maynooth collaborated with a university in Australia. Now we are only in Maynooth and have a small team size, but have been able to keep up with our current codebase.
One of my main (and unfortunately longest) contributions to my team is the whistle detector.
Gesture detection was a project I initially didn't think I'd be contributing to for the team, considering that my background is in audio signal processing, and have virtually no experience in developing ML models for computer vision, but here I was.
My interest in the league spans outside of my own team, as I do love the idea of the SPL, and I've wanted to help in its advancement for future years and competitions.