Posted: 6th August 2014

Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces, a joint team of University of Oxford and University of Amsterdam, won 1st place at the Infrastructure competition of the Rescue Simulation League at RoboCup 2014 held in July in João Pessoa, Brazil. 

A total of 6 teams from all over the world took part in the competition. The winning presentation was prepared by Victor Spirin, a doctoral student at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford supervised by Dr Stephen Cameron, and presented by Dr Arnoud Visser from the University of Amsterdam. The presentation introduced the Open Source version of MRESim, a multi-robot exploration simulator developed at Oxford by Julian de Hoog and Victor Spirin.

Robocup is a `grand challenge' project in robotics and artificial intelligence, with the goal of developing a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that would be able to win a game of football against the human world champions by the middle of the 21st century. The Rescue Simulation League provides a competitive environment for researchers to look into the potential use of robots in urban search and rescue scenarios, such as earthquakes and fires. The goal of the Infrastructure competition is to promote development of new simulator implementations and development toolkits for the Rescue Simulation League.

The presentation slides are available here, and the simulator is available here.