July 30, 2001
UW ‘Robodawg’ soccer players ready for international competition
A team of robot dogs programmed by University of Washington computer science students to kick, pass and head-bump their way to victory on a small-scale soccer field is undergoing final preparations for an international competition in Seattle that begins at the end of the week.
RoboCup-2001, a five-year-old competition that has taken the international artificial intelligence community by storm, will be Aug. 2-10 at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in downtown Seattle. More than 120 teams from 25 countries are expected to participate in categories ranging from small hand-sized robots to mechanized creations as large as people. This is the first time the competition has been held in the United States and the first time the UW is fielding a team. RoboCup-2001 is being held concurrently with the 17th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the world’s premier conference on A.I. issues.
“It was quite an honor to be asked to participate,” said Dieter Fox, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the UW and the faculty adviser overseeing the student soccer-dog team. “Our students have been working hard. We hope to be competitive and we definitely expect to learn a lot.”
Sony Corp., a sponsor of the event, provided robots for RoboCup-2001’s soccer-dog league. Competitors must program the mechanical dogs to recognize the ball, keep track of where they are on the field and work strategically as a team to score against the opposing side. The dogs sight off of location markers on either end of the field to maintain their orientation. The robots are fully autonomous — once the game starts, they’re essentially on their own.
“That’s one of the big challenges,” said Fox. “In programming the robots, you can anticipate a lot of things, but you can’t anticipate everything. The dogs need to be able to respond to the unexpected as well.”
The RoboCup competition was started in 1997 by leading artificial intelligence researcher Hiroaki Kitano as an international research and academic initiative. One of the major goals of the competitions is to develop a team of fully autonomous soccer-playing robots that will beat the human World Cup champion soccer team by 2050.
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ATTENTION ASSIGNMENT AND PHOTO EDITORS:
The UW “robodawgs” will be available to photograph while training this afternoon or Tuesday before 1 p.m. To arrange a time, contact Rob Harrill at (206) 543-2580 or rharrill@u.washington.edu.
For more information, contact Fox at (206) 685-2517 or fox@cs.washington.edu.
