GRASP Scores The Goal(d)
July 27, 2011 at 9:48 am
Despite Japan's heart-wrenching defeat over the US in the Women's World Cup Final, a team of several Penn Engineering students has helped American soccer triumph over Japan where it really counts: the humanoid robot league.
Members of Penn's GRASP Lab and a couple students from Virginia Tech made up the championship Team DARwIn in the "Humanoid Kid Size" competition at the 2011 RoboCup tournament in Istanbul. In the final round, DARwIn (Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence) defeated a team from Japan to definitively prove that Penn makes the sweetest sports-playing robots around.
Competitions like this are important, one team member says, because "they take the amazing research done in laboratories and push it to be more robust in real world situations," producing "resilient and feature-full humanoid robots that are better able to work alongside humans." As long as these resilient humanoid robots don't initiate a hostile apocalyptic takeover of the human race, we salute you again, Penngineers!
