Carnegie Mellon's Champion Robotic Soccer Team Leaves for Paris June 30 to Compete in RoboCup 98

CMUnited, Carnegie Mellon University's championship team of soccer playing robots and its developers will leave for Paris June 30 to participate in RoboCup 98, a competition which begins July 4 in combination with the Fourth International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems.

Last year, at the 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Nagoya, Japan, CMUnited bested other teams from France, Spain and Japan to win the small robot league championship This year, they'll be facing seven teams in that category. They will also participate in simulator competition, where they made the semifinals last year.

University researchers also will exhibit and demonstrate four-legged robots that look like dogs, which were developed by Sony Corp. and given to Carnegie Mellon, the University of Osaka, and the University of Paris 6.

CMUnited's small robots are cubes on wheels that are radio controlled autonomously by computers. They're 15 cm long, 12 cm wide and 15 cm high. Their playing field is a ping pong table without legs and the robots use a golf ball as a soccer ball.

Project leader Manuela Veloso, associate professor in the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, said the competition is bound to be fierce, and in anticipation, her research group has built five new, more sophisticated robots that will be brought to Paris with the six originals. She says if time allows, they will combine the old with the new and try to have them work together.

"We need faster robots with better team and collaboration skills," Veloso says. "We've changed our hardware and software technologies for RoboCup '98 to address these two goals. We want to get as close to a real soccer game as possible. We're aiming for real scientific achievement. Last year we were the only team with a strategy that involved more than getting the ball and kicking toward the goal," she said. "This year, our team will exhibit more defined behavior from the robot's point of view."

Veloso will be accompanied Paris by computer science graduate student Peter Stone, whose expertise is mini robot strategy and simulator play; undergraduate Pat Riley who works on simulation; Michael Bowling, a graduate student who works with the small robots; Kwun Han, a graduate student with expertise in vision; technician Sorin Achim, who is reponsible for hardware development; and William Uther, who works with the legged robots.

The Web site for the RoboCup 98 is http://www.robocup.org/02.html.

Contacts:

Return to: SCS News Releases
SCS-Today
School of Computer Science homepage

This page maintained by copetas@cs.cmu.edu.