If you've built a killer bot, naturally you want to show it off and demonstrate its superiority. To this end, robot competitions were born. While most are meant to spur robotics learning and innovation among students, some have a more serious goal.
The DARPA Grand Challenge, held in 2004 and 2005, had teams racing driverless vehicles across the deserts of the Southwest. Its goal was to promote development of vehicles that could be used by the military in dangerous situations, without endangering troops.
In 2004 no vehicle finished the challenge, but in 2005 five teams finished, with a team from Stanford University coming in first and claiming the $2 million prize. No future DARPA Grand Challenges have been announced, but there is speculation that a third could be held in 2007. A Nova special documenting the competition, The Great Robot Race, is scheduled to air March 28 and can be viewed on the PBS Web site the following day.
But most robot contests are for glory alone. Among the best-known is RoboCup, modeled on the World Cup soccer tournament.
The RoboCup's stated goal is to field a team of robots that can beat a human team at soccer by the year 2050. That's a long way off, but in the meantime, robot teams of all shapes and sizes compete against each other, in divisions such as the Four-Legged League (consisting of robots like Aibo and Robopet, which can be modified commercial bots or built from scratch). The 2006 RoboCup finals will be held in Bremen, Germany, in June.
RoboCup has spawned several offshoots, including competitions for search-and-rescue robots as well as a junior league for primary- and secondary-school students.
In fact, in the United States, kids have several options for getting involved in robot contests. In addition to the U.S. RoboCupJunior league, there's something called Botball, which is a program run through schools in 13 regions of the country with regional tournaments and a national championship.
The nonprofit organization FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) runs three different competitions. The FIRST Robotics Challenge and the FIRST Vex Challenge are designed for high-school students. In fact, the Vex robotics kit was developed partly to provide an affordable platform for students to compete with. There's also a FIRST Lego League aimed at 9- to 14-year-olds and based on Lego's Mindstorms platform.
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