Even though they weren't the winners, they proved a success by beating the Field Ranger team from Singapore, who were last year's RoboCup winners with a score of 2:1. This achievement placed the Plasma Z team into the top rank in Asia and the third in the world for the soccer robot competition.

A key success for the team came from all the young developers' efforts to create further technological improvements in their robotic players every year. For RoboCup 2005 held in Japan, the team was ranked 12th.

Nawarat Termtanasombat, a senior student at the university's Engineering Faculty, and also the team's captain, said that what made the team succeed this year was the new punt-ball feature which the team had developed as an add-on to the horizontal ball kick the robots could perform.

"The new feature allows the robot to make airborne kicks in a determined position so it can better shoot the ball to another player and then into the goal," she said.

The team designed and adjusted the robot's mechanical system to make a punt ball. They spent six months on the development and tests for this feature.

In addition, strategic planning was another key factor for their success. Nawarat said they had integrated a host of football strategies into the robot's artificial intelligence system. This would allow the system to evaluate the game situation continuously and determine a proper strategy to beat competitors.

In the game, each football team comprises five soccer robots - four are football players and the other is the goalkeeper.

To make a robot play the game, artificial intelligence is a key technology to feed information to the robot and then send commands to control the robot.

A vision system was another key factor. Nawarat said a camera was used to capture all the robots' movements. Information from the camera is sent through a cable to a computer to generate a picture of each robot's position.

"This information is vital as it will be a key factor for the artificial intelligence system to create a picture, evaluate the game situation and then calculate a suitable strategy to command the robot to move accordingly," she said.

She added that the development of soccer robots was an integration of various kinds of technology. It involved several engineering fields such as a vision system, mechanics, electronics and artificial intelligence.

"As each technology is designed and then integrated to make the robots play football, our development team has also come from different fields. The challenge for this development was that we had to work closely together to share knowledge, and most importantly, combine them to make our development a success," she said.

The success of the Plasma Z team in the RoboCup 2006, meanwhile, also resulted in the best technique award with the development of a new semi-auto referee system, which is to use a computer to make a game decision, instead of using humans.

"Normally we use humans to control a computer in making a decision as to which team will get the chance to take the ball at that time, but in this system, the computer will take over the task without involving humans," she said.

She added that the team would also use their experience from this world competition for further development of their robotic players.

"We plan to get into more development to work out the weak points, especially in mechanics, electronics and the artificial intelligence system which is most important," she said.

Plasma Z team's robotic players can move around at a speed of 2.5 metres per second and the team hopes to at least double that. It will also accelerate the shooting speed from the current 6.7 metres per second to 15 metres per second and make the shooting pattern more accurate.

All these new developments will hopefully allow the team laurels once again at the international level of soccer robot the forthcoming year.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation