Programming robots is fun: Robocup Jr. 2000

Abstract

During RoboCup Euro2000 we organized a tournament for schools using LEGO robots: RoboCup Jr. In this paper we present the objectives of RoboCup Jr. and describe the technical aspects of the robots. We also report on the event itself: how it was organized and what sort of tactics and computer programs were developed. 1 Introduction During the last ten years a number of Dutch Universities started an undergraduate studies in Articial Intelligence (AI) or modied a specialization program into a full undergraduate program in AI. This means that a rst year student can now choose whether he or she wants to study computer science, which is focused on the hard and software of the computing machinery or articial intelligence, which is focused on the information technology and its use to create intelligent systems or to model them. Apart from the programming skills students are taught subjects such as cognitive science, philosophy, computational linguistics or robotics. In secondary sch...