Turkish Cypriot team wins RoboCup football competition

By Murat Demirci

LEFKOSA, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (AA) - A robotics football team from the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) has won the first place at the RoboCup 2018, the world cup of robot football held in Canada.

The “NEUIslanders” of Near East University (NEU) won the first place at the competition held on June 18-22.

Ersin Aytac, the team captain and a researcher at NEU’s Robotics Laboratory, told Anadolu Agency that the team has been working for the last ten years to become the champion and that they are proud to receive the first place.

Aytac said that teams from the U.S., Germany, Iran, Japan, China, the Netherlands, and Colombia participated at the competition.

He added that NEUIslanders has defeated the embargo against the TRNC.

Aytac said the team had been participating in the competitions since 2012 and became the champion in 2018, leaving 13 other teams behind.

“We made the robots’ artificial intelligence, their electronics engineering, and design,” Aytac said.

“We transfer the footage of 6 to 9 meter-long field from cameras to robots. When the match began we just tied our arms and watched our robots,” he said.

“At the end, the biggest happiness was to see the TRNC flag on the top,” he added.

Aytac said that they have developed the best artificial intelligence on robotics fields and they will try to keep winning championships.

The RoboCup International Competition is organized every year in a different country since 1997 and considered as one of the world's major scientific events in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence.

According to the organizer's website, their aim is to field "a team of robots capable of winning against the human soccer World Cup champions by 2050".