BY EVAN WOOD
DIRECTOR OF ICT SERVICES
It’s not often that we get to say that ICC Sydney has been taken over by robots however, this is exactly what happened last month when we hosted the 2019 RoboCup.
Established in 1997, the original mission of the RoboCup was to field a team of robots capable of winning against the human soccer World Cup champions by 2050 and now, it is heralded as one of the world’s leading scientific initiatives.
For the 2019 RoboCup, over 2,000 competitors from over 40 countries descended on ICC Sydney to put their state-of-the-art robots to the test in an incredible spectacle.
More than 300 teams representing universities and research laboratories gathered in our Exhibition Centre to practice, train and compete in various robot leagues simultaneously.
This required an extremely robust and complex set of networking deliverables to support each team and their bespoke equipment requirements. Not only did we need to have the right technology set up in place for competitors but equally, we needed to provide the thousands of local and international spectators who came along as supporters with reliable internet connectivity.
We worked closely with the event organisers, with our first meeting two and a half years pre-event, to ensure a flawless execution of the event’s ICT requirements.
This entailed the ICC Sydney ICT team working alongside HP Aruba in setting up more than 100 wireless access points in the exhibition halls alone, with access points mounted at floor level with directional antennas situated strategically at each field of play for optimal radio frequency coverage. This augmented the existing 80 Access Points in the space which were designed to interoperate with each other.