RoboCup-2001: The Fifth Robotic Soccer World Championships

RoboCup-2001 was the Fifth International RoboCup Competition and Conference (figure 1). It was held for the first time in the United States, following RoboCup-2000 in Melbourne, Australia; RoboCup-99 in Stockholm; RoboCup-98 in Paris; and RoboCup-97 in Osaka. RoboCup is a research-oriented initiative that pioneered the field of multirobot research of robot teams starting in 1996. In those days, most of the robotics research was focused on single-robot issues. RoboCup opened a new horizon for multirobot research: Teams of robots need to face other teams of robots to accomplish specific goals. This challenging objective offers a broad and rich set of research and development questions, to wit the construction of mechanically sound and robust robots, real-time effective perception algorithms, and dynamic behavior-based approaches to support teamwork. RoboCup has truly been a research-oriented endeavor. Every year, the RoboCup researchers analyze the progress of the research and extend the competitions and demonstrations in the different leagues to create new challenges. The ultimate goal of RoboCup is to reach a point where teams of robots can successfully compete with human players. The RoboCup events move toward this goal. This article discusses in detail each one of the events at RoboCup-2001, focusing on the competition leagues. As an overview of the complete RoboCup-2001 (table 1 lists all the teams), and as an introduction to this article, we first provide a short description of the RoboCup-2001 events. The general chair of RoboCup-2001 was Manuela Veloso. The associate chairs in charge of robotic and simulation events, respectively, were Tucker Balch and Peter Stone. International symposium: This was a twoday international symposium with presentations of technical papers addressing AI and robotics research of relevance to RoboCup. Twenty papers and 42 posters were successfully presented in perception and multiagent behaviors. The proceedings will be published by Springer and are edited by program chairs Andreas Birk, Silvia Coradeschi, and Satoshi Tadokoro. Articles