1. 2003 FIRA Cup Austria

1. FIRA Cup
The confrontational table and the rule of competition are going to be scheduled soon.
The length of time for the preliminary league is going to be 5 minutes, same as the existing state. On the contrary, it is under examination to extend time of the finals up to 7 minutes and 30 seconds. These items will be notified as soon as it is determined with the confrontational table and the rule of competition.

The number of registered teams in the various categories
- Large League MiroSot : 9 Teams from 6 Nations
- Middle League MiroSot : 21 Teams from 11 Nations
- Small League MiroSot : 23 Teams from 13 Nations
- HuroSot : 8 Teams from 5 Nations
- KheperaSot : 4 Teams from 3 Nations
- Large League SimuroSot : 11 Team from 5 Nations
- Middle League SimuroSot : 18 Teams from 10 Nations
- RoboSot : 8 Teams from 6 Nations
- NaroSot : 2 Teams from 1 Nations

2. FIRA Congress-
By the 15th of June 60 papers have been submitted and the dead line for the paper will be postponed by the end of June. The seminar joined by Korea and Austria is going to be held during FIRA Congress.

* Official 2003 FIRA Cup website: http://www.ihrt.tuwien.ac.at/FIRAWM03/


2. FIRA European Cup

Excitement, boisterousness, challenge were all over there, European cup 2003 held in Ljubljana Slovenia on June 2-5.

Home teams were strong!
Mala Olimpija(small league MiroSot) and Ljubljana Dragons(Middle League MiroSot), these two Slovenian teams got the 1st place.

Small League MiroSot
1st Ljubljana Dragons (SL)
2nd Austro-M (AUT)
3rd RoBohemia (CZ)

Middle League MiroSot
1st Mala Olimpija (SL)
2nd RoBohemia (CZ)
3rd Austro-M (AUT)

For more detail game results and pictures of the competition,
click to http://robotsoccer.fe.uni-lj.si
(It is the official website of FIRA European Cup 2003)



3. China National Competition

[China National Competition]
1. Due to the SARS, the 4th China National Competition has postponed from June 21-25 to the end of July, which will be held at Harbin Institute of Technology by FIRA Branch in China.

2. At present, the registered robot soccer teams have extended to more than 40. More than 40 universities will participate in the 4th China National Competition.
Official FIRA Brainch in China Website: www.firachina.net


4. FIRA Korea Junior Cup

For the first time, FIRA Korea Junior Cup was held at KAIST in Daejeon,Korea, on May 28~29. Junior cup is a robot soccer competition targeting 7~18-years-old students. Boys and Girls expressed their feeling frankly, such as (^ o ^) & (T . T).
Check their smart and cute figures in the the movie.
>>view


5. Robot Soccer to ASEAN

MRDEC (Micro Robot Design Education center) at KAIST in Korea was nominated as the organization in charge of the ACU(ASEAN Cooperation System Unit)’s project: "Technology Network for Multi-robot Cooperation System Development".
So MRDEC conducts the robot-soccer training course for 2 persons per each ASEAN country.(The Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei Drussalam, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia)

Interested poeple can apply to this program. To participants, a full robot soccer system and all expenses will be provided. Participants will visit Korea twice. (One for technical course conducted in this November and the other for ASEAN Cup held in February 2004)

Candidates should be professors in robotic research base or related to the fields and have a good understanding of English and C language.

If you are interested and want to participate in this program, contact to asean@mrdec.org
The official website will be opened soon.


6. FIRA People

Interveiw with Newneu team

Newneu is a Chinese robot-soccer team. Even though they have never ranked as the first place on FIRA Cup, but they have been keeping quite good records in various categories and one of the prospective teams for the next world champion.

Let’s look inside their story and vision of robot soccer.



Tutor: Xu Xinhe (Professor)
Team leader: Fang Shuai (Ph.D Student)
members: Zhou Zhizhong (Graduate Student )
Xia Chuan (Graduate Student )
Sun Xiaolin (Graduate Student )
Feng Ting (Graduate Student )

1. When did your team first begin robot soccer? Tell us a short history of Newneu.

NewNeu robot-soccer team, the first Chinese robot-soccer team, was born in The Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics , Northeastern University in Shenyang in 1997. Professor Xu Xinhe, the director of the institute, was the initiator and leader of NewNeu team. When professor Xu attended The Asian Control Conference in Korea in 1997, he found there were no Chinese robot-soccer teams in FIRA robot-soccer world cup. After he returned to China, he made up his mind to establish the first Chinese robot-soccer team.
After five months’ hard work, professor Xu and his research group have made great progress. They excogitated the whole set of hardware and software of the soccer-robot system, which includes four subsystems: vision subsystem, strategy subsystem, communication subsystem and robot subsystem.

In the past 5 years, NewNeu team won many awards in the international competitions. In 1999, NewNeu team represented China to take part in the international match firstly. They successfully made through the primary
match of robot world cup in Korea and won the right to attend the 4th robot soccer world cup competition in Brazil, there NewNeu team won the championship in the Benchmark match, which is the first championship of
Chinese soccer-robot teams in the robot world cup. Except that, they also won the 5th place in the Mirosot match.
In May 2002, NewNeu team attended the 7th robot world cup competition that is hold in Korea. They won a second prize and two third prizes in the four matches. In October 2002, as one of the strongest robot soccer teams in the
world, NewNeu team was invited to attend the FIRA Invitation Championship in Dortmund and won the third prize.

2. What categories your teams is preparing now?

Our team is preparing for the Mirosot and Simurosot matches, especially the large league Mirosot.

3. How was the name(Newneu) made?

NEU is the abbreviation of Northeastern University. NewNEU means our team represents a new appearance of our University.

4. NewnEU have performed prominently in various categories such as Mirosot, Simurosot. (last 2002 Korea Cup, your teams rank on 3rd in middle league mirosot and 2nd in Middle Simurosot) Do you have any plan to participate other category like Hurosot?

We do have great interests in Hurosot match and also make some reseach work about it. But we do not plan to participate the match in 2003 cup before we make good preparation.

5. What is the most attractiveness of robot soccer to your team?

Robot soccer is a good test-bed for real-time intelligent control system. Many intelligent systems problems include learning, sensor fusion, multi-agent systems, cooperation can be tested through robot soccer match.

6. Can you tell us your team’s special strategies?

Our strategies mark every robot with a serial number according to a preference judging function. Each robot has its own task and it will not be confused. So the operation of robots can be more freely and effective.

7. Which team was the hardest team Newneu have ever played with in competition.

Kinggo(Korea) team is the Champ of the middle league mirosot in 2002 FIRA cup. We once had a match with them and the result was 2:3. We think they are the hardest team we have ever played with.



7. HQ visitor

Prof. Amer S. AL Yahmadi (Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University) visited FIRA Headquarters. He is in preparation with his lab students to participate in FIRA Cup 2004. FIRA members will be possible to play with teams from Oman.


8. Announcement from FIRA

* Maybe you were surprised to see our brand new newsletter base on the web. We hope you get more informative news on FIRA and interactive communication between FIRA members by this newsletter.

* We have opened our web site to the unregistered people for more easy access and shared joy of robot soccer. You can visit FIRA site without time-consumptive login.

* HQ prepared the competition board at for FIRA Cup Austria 2003. So if you have any question or would like to report your team’s news or status, please feel free to use competition board.


9. THE FEDERATION OF INTERNATIONAL ROBOT-SOCCER ASSOCIATION

Editor-in-chief: Jong-Hwan Kim
Editors: Prahlad Vadakkepat, Han Pang Huang, Igor Verner, Elmer Dadios, Jun Jo, Norbert Jesse, Paul Robinson, Hong Bingrong, Man-Wook Han, Amitabha Mukerjee, Chao Cheng, Chris H. Messom, Krzysztof R.Kozlowski, J.L. de la Rosa I Esteva, Seow Kiam Tian

Editorial Staff: Jin-Wook Kim, Jin-Ah Lee, Eun-Kyung Naccy Na, Hyun-Min Park

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E-mail: fira@fira.net URL: http://www.fira.net
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