Carnegie Mellon Fields Soccer-Playing Robots and Rescue RobotSimulation At This Year's International RoboCup Competition

Byron SpiceMonday, July 2, 2007

Carnegie Mellon University is fielding two teams of autonomous, soccer playing robots and a rescue robot simulation at RoboCup 2007, the International RoboCup Federation's annual competition, which takes place July 1-10 at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Teams from all over the world will compete in a number of leagues, including the four-legged AIBO league, small and mid-sized robot leagues humanoid, robot rescue, and robots at home leagues, as well as various simulations. The goal is to promote the field of artificial intelligence, robotics and related fields by creating robot soccer teams capable of defeating the human world soccer champions by 2050.

Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor Manuela Veloso, who helped to initiate the international competition in 1997, is advising the AIBO team, CMDash '07, and the small-sized robot team CMDragons, which won the international championship in its class last year in Bremen, Germany.

The leader of CMDash this year is Juan Fasola, fifth-year graduate student in computer science, along with CS undergrads, Michael Phillips, Somchaya Liemhetcharat and Gregory Stephen.

The CMDragons will compete under the leadership of Jim Bruce, who finished his PhD in Dec06, Stefan Zickler, a second-year PhD student in computer science and research engineer Michael Licitra.

Robotics Institute Research Professor Katia Sycara and a team including Systems Scientist, Paul Scerri, first year PhD student Prasanna Velagapudi, and Professor Michael Lewis and PhD student Jijun Wang, from the University of Pittsburgh will be competing in the Robot Rescue simulation league. The simulation they'll be using for the competition was developed by Sycara's group under a National Science Foundation Information Technology Research grant investigating robot-agent-person (RAP) teams for urban search and rescue.

For more information, and to keep an eye on the competition as it unfolds, see www.robocup.org.

For more on Carnegie Mellon's activities in robot soccer, see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer/main/

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Byron Spice | 412-268-9068 | bspice@cs.cmu.edu