All Girl RoboCup Team Heads for Japan

Posted 9 Jun 2005 at 23:31 UTC by steve

A NewsWise story gives the details of the Spelman College all girl RoboCup Team called the SpelBots. Defying the myth that girls can't do well at engineering and science, the team is one of only five US teams to make it to the 2005 RoboCup World Soccer Championship in the Sony four legged league. The team has chosen CMU's Tekkotsu development framework as the basis for their control software. For more details see the Spelman College press release and the team's website.

Random Tangents, posted 10 Jun 2005 at 02:13 UTC by jlin » (Master)

They were also at the American Open in Georgia! It was amusing seeing so many other girls, since in the past there have only been 1-2 girls per team, though it's interesting that many times that one girl turns out to be the student team leader (as is the case for the CMU legged team CMPack, the Ohio University small-sized team RoboCats and the JHU mid-sized team Smokin' Jays).

As for random useless info, if you read in the credits of Tekkotsu, it talks about the specific dogs they were developed on, and also lists Ethan Tira-Thompson as the "Grand Poobah of Architecture and Manipulation". This past November, Ethan got engaged to Sylvia Arifin in an interesting way using these dogs. If you read the story, you'll find the names of these very same dogs as major players of the proposal.

More useless info about dorky proposals coming out of the CMU labs. Colin McMillen, who is on the CMU legged team, had a dorky proposal himself last August. It was even listed in Wikipedia under online proposals, though it didn't involve the robot dogs this time.

Very cool!, posted 10 Jun 2005 at 16:52 UTC by jeffkoenig » (Master)

It's great to read:

1) An encouraging story about women in engineering, and

2) Some interesting insight from an insider. Thanks, JLIN!

Best of luck to Team Spelbot!