Nanosoccer at RoboCup Open this weekend

If the picture looks faintly odd, it's not because it's a render: it's because it was taken by a scanning electron microscope and depicts microscopically-small robots playing Nanosoccer on a field smaller than a grain of rice. This weekend, the National Institute of Standards and Technology will host RoboCup 2008's nanosoccer exhibition right here at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. It'll include several events to be battled out by teams from the U.S. Naval Academy, the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and CMU itself.

The 2-Millimeter Dash: Each nanobot chooses the optimal time for a goal-to-goal sprint across the playing field.
-Slalom Drill: Robots race from goal to goal while avoiding “defenders” (polymer posts) that block the path.
-Ball-Handling Drill: Robots “dribble” as many microdisks as possible into a goal within a 3-minute period.

Here's some amazing video of a tiny 'bot 'dribbling' a 'ball'...

Public invited to See Nanosoccer 2008 US RoboCup Open [Medgadget via BotJunkie]

[#1 posted by strider_mt2k , May 20, 2008 6:45 AM]

Who knew ATARI of all folks would be so prescient as to predict what this nano-scale world would look like in their early home video games?

Now if you could only make them shoot at each other with those curving shots...

[#2 posted by Rob Beschizza , May 20, 2008 8:25 AM]

Wow, good point! It looks just like a 2600 game!

[#3 posted by Agies , May 20, 2008 9:46 AM]

The RoboCup US Open will not be hapening at CMU but at the Carnegie Science Center on the North Shore.

[#4 posted by Enochrewt , May 20, 2008 9:57 AM]

I thought of the Atar 2600 game "Warlords" when I saw the picture.

[#5 posted by Rob Beschizza , May 20, 2008 2:14 PM]

Agies, thanks for the correction. I wondered why I was getting blank stares.

[#6 posted by stratosfyr , May 20, 2008 5:51 PM]

Oh God. Can I just hide until after the inevitable apocalypse? I know what's coming and I don't think I can bear to watch.