===== FIRA | Federation of International Robot-soccer Association ===

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About FIRA

FIRA robot soccer, a brainchild of Prof. Jong-Hwan Kim, KAIST, began in 1995 and the first international championship was held at KAIST, Daejeon, Korea in 1996.

And Federation of International Robot-soccer Association (FIRA) was established on June 5, 1997 during the micro-robot soccer tournament (MiroSot'97) held at KAIST in Daejeon, Korea. FIRA Robot World Cup is held every year on global-scale. FIRA Robot World Congress is held along with FIRA Cup, where all participating teams will submit and present papers on their robots and schemes for sharing the expertise and technology for building the soccer robots.

Objectives

• To take the spirit of science and technology to the young generation and laymen.
• To promote the development of autonomous multi-agent robotic system that can cooperate
with each other and to contribute to the state-of-the-art technology improvement in this
specialized field.
• To bring together skilled researchers and students from different backgrounds such as
robotics, sensor fusion, intelligent control, communication, image processing, mechatronics,
computer technology, artificial life, etc. into a new and growing interdisciplinary field of
intelligent autonomous soccer-robots to play the game of soccer.
• To organize the FIRA Robot World Cup and Congress every year
• To work together to establish the FIRA Robot World Cup as a Science and Technology World
Cup

Associated Research Topics

Micro-Robot World Soccer Tournament (MiroSot) initiative gives a good arena for multi-agent research, dealing with research subjects such as cooperation protocol by distributed control, effective communication and fault tolerance, while having efficiency of cooperation, adaptation, robustness and being in real-time.

With the ever increase in number of robots in an industrial environment, scientists/technologists were often faced with issues on cooperation and coordination among different robots and their self-governance in a
workspace. This has led to the developments in multi-robot cooperative autonomous systems. The roponents of multi-robot autonomous systems needed a model to test the theories being proposed to test its efficacy
and efficiency. It is not a surprise that they started focussing on robot soccer. Robot soccer makes heavy demands in all the key areas of robot technology, mechanics, sensors and intelligence. And it does so in a
competitive setting that people around the world can understand and enjoy.
The Micro-Robot Wold Cup Soccer Tournament (MiroSot) thus was given birth, and a new interdisciplinary research area emerged, where scientists and technologists from diverse fields like, robotics, intelligent control, communication, computer technology, sensor technology, image processing, mechatronics, artificial life, etc., work together to make the multi-robot systems a reality. The robots used in MiroSot are small in size (7.5cm x 7.5cm x 7.5cm), fully/semi autonomous and without any human operators.
MiroSot involves multiple robots that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives.

In multi-robot systems, other robots in addition to the uncertainty that may be inherent in the domain, can determine the environment's dynamics.
They have dynamic environments as other robots intentionally affect the environment in unpredictable ways. The key aspect being the need for robots not only to control themselves, but also to track and control the
ball which is a passive part of the environment. The interesting theoretical issue behind MiroSot experiments is the use of soccer as a prototype example of a complex, adaptive system. MiroSot is a new interdisciplinary research area, where scientists and technologists from diverse fields like, robotics, intelligent control, communication, computer technology, sensor technology, image processing, mechatronics, artificial life, etc., can work together to make the multi-robot systems a reality.