INTRODUCTION

This project, EUROBOT, is an innovative proposal involving both robotics (computer science and engineering) and social sciences. EUROBOT focuses on a new and promising testbed in research, transfer of technology, and the society-university paradigm development.

The core of EUROBOT can be summarised in one question: ”What kind of robot should be designed to enable a team to be well organised in order to solve a specific complex problem?”

The specific complex problem retained is, as a first step, the problem of playing football. Based on the rules of some international associations of researchers (FIRA and RoboCup), the football game is defined as follows: the robots run and play completely autonomously in a special field under the conditions determined by the scientific community. Researchers, then, evaluate the quality of the performance.

The game of playing football implies a lot of industrial problems because several issues must be taken into account simultaneously: dynamic environment, hostile environment and real-time operating conditions. The enumeration of applicable industries is very large. At present, in Asia, very important multinational enterprises are investing substantial amounts in this field of research. An analogy in Europe is highly recommendable and some initial public investments are necessary. One of the advantages of this project, is that it covers such a large scope of domains that its successful outcome can only be reached through the narrow collaboration between the university and industrial society.

EUROBOT proposes to use a testbed inspired by the football game. It consists of co-operative mobile robots that run in a hostile dynamic environment.

In general terms, this testbed contains the following benefits compared to existing testbeds,

For University. Updating scientific challenges for new trends of artificial intelligence (AI) and software engineering, such as the chess game triggered challenges in the past.
For Industry. Promoting investments in technological innovation, such as F1 car competitions encouraged the innovation in the automobile industry.
For Society. Promoting technological entertainment using the wide public (laymen, institutions, university students and research institutions) interest in the game of football.

In fact, the subject of this proposal has already been placed in an open international discussion. Indeed, several competitions held in Korea in November 96 and June 97, and in Japan in August 97, proved that this subject is very promising at international level. Facing this, an European stream is under construction (today 14 countries in Europe, including the Mediterranean and Eastern countries, are participating in this project). This stream is certainly important compared to the 21 countries world-wide that are already working on the subject.

Social Impact

All ages, but specially the younger generation are attracted by this scientific game

Developments applied to ameliorate the robotic team have impact to public domain, and this stimulate researchers, especially young students and researchers

To motivate research and technologic development

Eurobot / peplluis@eia.udg.es