RoboCup Small-Size League: Past, Present and Future

The Small Size Robot League (SSL) was among the founding RoboCup leagues in the 1997 competition held during IJCAI’97 in Nagoya, Japan. Since then, the league has experienced various advances in terms of robot design, number of robots, field size, software algorithms and other infrastructure used during the games, among these the recent standardization of the vision system shared by all teams. The SSL league has been one of the fastest paced leagues in RoboCup where teamwork, coordination, high-level strategies and artificial intelligence have played a critical role in the league development. As robots speeds have greatly increased in the past years, the league has witnessed the development of advanced control and cooperative algorithms. In parallel, shared open software, in particular the shared vision system has made it easier for new teams to join the league. In this paper we discuss the past, present and future of the Small Size League in its path towards the goal of achieving robot vs. human soccer in 2050.