Rehearsing the future

Building a team of collaborative mobile robot soccer players

Robot Soccer is enjoying unprecedented international interest and success. RoboCup is an international research and education initiative whose goal is to foster intelligent agent and mobile robot research by providing challenges in a complex and dynamic environment problem where a wide range of technologies can be examined, integrated, and most importantly compared.

This talk will highlight the scientific challenges involved in building a team of robots capable of playing soccer in real time using movie clips from robot soccer matches. Some of the challenges are operational, e.g.robot locomotion and robot localization, some involve collaboration, e.g. passing the ball, and others are strategic, e.g. what information should be shared amongst the team in order to create competitive advantage.

The grand vision of RoboCup is to build a team of robots that can out play the human FIFA World Cup team by 2050. One of the major challenges that will need to be addressed in order to achieve this dream is the development of robots that can represent and reason about their own capabilities, and that know what they and their teammates are doing and planning to do. In pursuit of these objectives solving the perception grounding problem becomes paramount. Mary-Anne will describe a new grounding framework developed by her team together with John McCarthy of Stanford University and Peter Gardenfors of Cognitive Science Lund University, Sweden.