The Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces compete in the Virtual Robots competition of RoboCup, an international organization that promotes the development of robotics and artificial intelligence. The Virtual Robots competition is part of the RoboCup Rescue branch.

The goal of the Virtual Robots competition is the development of intelligent exploration techniques for teams of robots that must explore and map a simulated disaster zone (such as for example a collapsed building). In the long term, it is hoped that the techniques and ideas developed in this competition will be used by real robot teams in search and rescue efforts.

A number of very interesting problems must be solved for a team to be successful in this league, including: navigation, mapping, victim detection, exploration, development of a practical human-robot interface, communication and cooperation. See our Publications page for the original work performed by the members of our team to solve this issues.

The Universiteit van Amsterdam has been competing in this competition since its inception at RoboCup 2006 in Bremen, as indicated in our Achievements page. In 2006 the UvA Rescue tema became 3rd and won the award for best mapping algorithm. At RoboCup 2007 in Atlanta, the team reached the semifinals again. As of 2008, the team has been developed jointly by members of Amsterdam and Oxford Universities, leading to a renaming of the team from UvA Rescue to Amsterdam Oxford Joint Rescue Forces. In 2008 our team was very successful in the Regional competitions, while many improvements led to a 3rd place finish in Graz in 2009. In 2010 our team both visited Tehran and Singapore. In 2010 a new simulator was introduced and our team contributed to several of the new features. This year the Virtual Rescue competition will be held in Tehran and Istanbul and at both locations a delegation of our team is present.

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