Karachi Koalas

Karachi Koalas is an outcome of an ongoing scientific collaboration between the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi (IBA) and the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). We are the first team in 3D simulation league that spans across two continents. We qualified and participated at the 2011 World RoboCup Soccer in Istanbul making it to the second round of the competition in our first year. On the strength of our performance in 2011 we have qualified for 2012 World RoboCup Soccer in Mexico.

History

Karachi Koalas was formed in the mid of 2010 as a result of a strong and further evolving scientific partnership between the Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab at UTS and the Artificial Intelligence Lab at IBA.

UTS has a strong commitment to the RoboCup competition and has been a frequent participant in the Standard Platform League starting from 2003. It won the Australian RoboCup Championship competition in 2004, and won the Scientific Challenges and Runner-Up of World RoboCup in the same year. Since 2008, it has formed a joint Standard Platform League team, named WrightEagleUnleashed, with University of Science and Technology China, which was the Runner-Up of 2008 World RoboCup.

IBA, on the other hand, being one of the premier higher education schools in Pakistan, is also committed to robotics related education and has taken several pioneering steps to introduce robotics at freshman and high school level. The human resource and skill sets present at both UTS and IBA complement each other’s research interest well and is already resulting in collaboration in many areas within realm of RoboCup.

Sponsors

This ongoing partnership would not have been possible without the generous support we've recieved from Endeavour Awards of Department of Education, Employment and Work Relations of Australian Government, Australian Research Council, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, UTS and Faculty of Computer Science, IBA.