Reaching the Goal at RoboCup

At the 2008 RoboCup Junior Northeast Regional in Boston, Mercersburg robotics students took top honors in the soccer and rescue categories.

The duo of Sean Johnson '08 and Jay Whyel '08 finished first in the soccer category. The competition pits two teams of robots in a head-to-head game of robot soccer. An infrared emitting ball is used so that robots can see the ball with special sensors; the goal, just as in regular soccer, is to score the most goals and keep the opposition from scoring.

In the rescue category, Dave O'Brien '08 and Ethan McGhee '09 teamed up to capture first place. Mercersburg swept the top four places in the event; following O'Brien and McGhee were Peter Cooke '08, Daniel Barberan '08, and Jeff Chung '08. The event simulates disaster recovery, with a robot racing against the clock to locate "victims" in a building by following a black line through an obstacle course.

Twenty-two students from Mercersburg competed at the two-day event (held on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus), which was one of three regional events in the United States prior to the international RoboCup event scheduled for July in Suzhou, China. All seven of Mercersburg's placewinners are eligible to represent the United States at the competition overseas.

"I was very proud of how our students represented Mercersburg," said Julie Maurer '90, head of the mathematics department, who accompanied the competitors to Boston. "They worked hard, played fair, and were good sports. They displayed creativity and intelligence, and had to think on their feet and adapt to new environments and challenges."

Chung represented Mercersburg at last year's international competition, which was held in Atlanta. He placed first for the U.S. in the rescue category.

"We should be proud that our students earned the right to represent the U.S. in international competition against the best robotics students in the world," Maurer said.

RoboCup is an international joint project to promote artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and related fields. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing standard problems where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined.