The Robot World Cup Initiative

Hiroaki Kitano, President, The RoboCup Federation, Bern, Switzerland, Senior Researcher, Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Tokyo

The Robot World Cup Initiative (RoboCup) is an international initiative to foster robotics and AI technologies using soccer games. It is one of the fastest growing areas of robotics and AI research, with over 1,500 researchers and students in over 20 countries throughout the world participating. The basic idea behind the initiative is to provide a common problem for researchers so that various different approaches can be evaluated in the same domain, and technical information can be shared to promote further research. The ultimate goal of the initiative can be stated as follows: By the mid-21st century, a team of soccer playing humanoid robots shall beat the champion of the most recent World Cup under FIFA official rules.

Building a robot to play a soccer game by itself does not generate any significant social and economic impact, but the accomplishment will certainly considered a major achievement in the field of robotics. We call this kind of project a landmark project. RoboCup is a landmark project as well as a standard problem. The successful landmark project claims to accomplish very attractive and broadly appealing goals. The most successful example is the Apollo space program. In case of the Apollo project, the U.S. committed to the goal of ``landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.'' Initially, RoboCup is designed to meet the chalenge of handling real world complexities, though in a limited world, while maintaining affordable problem size and research cost. As technology progress, we will soon move to more sophisticated robotic soccer players, namely legged robots and humanoid robots. RoboCup offers an integrated research task covering the broad areas of AI and robotics. Such areas include: real-time sensor fusion, reactive behavior, strategy acquisition, learning, real-time planning, multi-agent systems, context recognition, vision, strategic decision-making, motor control, intelligent robot control, and many more.  In this talk, I will describe the current status of the initiative, illustrate some major technical challenges, and discuss the future vision of the RoboCup Initiative.