I guess I do stuff in academia. It's not much but it's honest work. Just some basic stuff on Robots and in University. Hope it's interesting somewhat for you though.
RoboCup is an international competition where several academics staff and students, get together to compete in different areas aiming to further the research into robotics. Originally started off with soccer, there are now different domains, and within these domains are different leagues you can participate in. From the domains of @home, industrial, junior, rescue, and soccer, I've only participated in soccer, and specifically the Standard Platform League (SPL for short).
The SPL has been replaced by the HSL, as the RoboCup Federation wanted to consolidate the different humanoid leagues into one.
The ultimate goal of RoboCup while progressing the area of robotics, has been to have robots being able to compete with the reigning FIFA world champions in soccer with the official FIFA ruleset by 2050. Currently we are halfway there and progress has been made. Within the soccer domain, there is the humanoid league that develop robots that resemble the structure of a human, and so have to deal with the constraints that we have with regards to movement, balance and the like.
Started in 2009, I've joined RoboÉireann since 2022, and have tried to be an active contributer to it til the present day. We're the only robocup team in Ireland, regardless of domain and league, originally NUmanoids when Maynooth collaborated with a university in Australia. Now we are only in Maynooth and have a small team size, but have been able to keep up with our current codebase.
It's changed a lot since 2022, and has now been deprecated as we move to the HSL unfortunately. The HSL has changed a lot of what we need for playing, on top of new & different robots we'd be using for the competition, that a lot of the old codebase wouldn't be able to work with the new robots.
One of my main (and unfortunately longest) contributions to my team is the whistle detector. It's kinda because of my lack of formal education into the Machine Learning space, as it was not part of my engineering course, so I have to make-do with what I know.
I do have a background in audio signal processing, which has served me quite well despite my ML ineptness.
Gesture detection was a project I initially didn't think I'd be contributing to for the team, considering that my background is in audio signal processing, and have virtually no experience in developing ML models for computer vision, but here I was.
My interest in the league spans outside of my own team, as I do love the idea of the SPL, and I've wanted to help in its advancement for future years and competitions. I served as an Organizing Committee (OC) member for 2023-2024, and Technical Committee (TC) member for 2024-2025.
I did SPUR in 2022, though since I haven't written stuff about it since then, I kinda have forgotten more intricate details about the period.
This kinda was shortlived due to personal circumstances, but I was a research masters student from 2024-2025, after a period of being an FPGA developer intern for a year, with the company that funded the masters.