RoboCup Jr.: RoboCup for edutainment

Abstract

The Robot World Cup Initiative (RoboCup) is an international joint project to promote science and technology in intelligent robotics, AI and related fields with the specific goal of building a fully humanoid robot that can be the human world cup champion by 2050, and to apply technologies developed in this activity to socially significant issues such as rescue, and for next generation industries. This idea inspired the imagination of people and it has grown to be one of the largest research areas in multi-agent robotics. The paper discusses extension of RoboCup activity for education and edutainment. Specifically, RoboCup has initiated a new project called RoboCup Jr. that aims at promotion of engineering education and popularization of robotics using RoboCup. A RoboCup Jr. league will be created to meet diverse needs of the education field, and a series of organizational frameworks are proposed to develop a network of social, personal, educational, and technical infrastructures to assist those who are interested in RoboCup Jr. activity.