RoboCup Soccer Leagues

R oboCup was created in 1996 by a group of Japanese, American, and European artificial intelligence and robotics researchers with a formidable, visionary long-term challenge: By 2050 a team of robot soccer players will beat the human World Cup champion team. At that time — the mid 1990s — there were very few effective mobile robots, and the Honda P2 humanoid robot had just been presented to the public for the first time. The RoboCup challenge, set as an adversarial game between teams of autonomous robots, was therefore a fascinating and exciting development as well as a reference problem for AI. 1 RoboCup introduced three robot soccer leagues, Simulation , Small Size, and Middle Size, and organized its first competitions at the 1997 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Nagoya, Japan. It had a surprisingly large number (100!) of participants. From those modest n RoboCup was created in 1996 by a group of Japanese, American, and European artificial intelligence and robotics researchers with a formidable, visionary long-term challenge: By 2050 a team of robot soccer players will beat the human World Cup champion team. In this article, we focus on RoboCup robot soccer, and present its five current leagues, which address complementary scientific challenges through different robot and physical setups. Full details on the status of the RoboCup soccer leagues, including league history and past results, upcoming competitions, and detailed rules and specifications are available from the league homepages and wikis.