Robot team finishes fourth in world
by Byron Kho
The Daily Pennsylvanian
October 8, 2004
Penn's RoboCup team placed fourth in the four-legged league competition of the international RoboCup 2004, held in Lisbon, Portugal, this past July.
By defeating teams from countries such as France and Japan, the UPennalizers were able to approach, but not match, their achievements of last year's RoboCup in Italy, where they placed second overall. Losing only to a German consortium and two Australian teams, they finished first among the American teams, which included representatives from Columbia and Carnegie Mellon universities, as well as the University of Washington.
Headed by RoboCup organizing committee member and Engineering professor Daniel Lee, the mostly undergraduate team has been involved with RoboCup for over five years -- but for reasons besides a place on the podium.
"The four-legged league is most representative of the big problems in robotics," said Engineering and Wharton senior David Cohen, a member of the UPennalizers. "What we learn there is immediately applicable all over the field -- in localization, mapping, team communication. It just follows the general tide of robotics research."
Indeed, the whole point of involvement in RoboCup is to further artificial intelligence and robotics research through the use of a "standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be examined and integrated."
The standard problem for this competition is a miniature soccer game played by teams of four Sony AIBO canine robots on a field measuring almost 3-by-5 meters. Using cameras to identify visual cues, and wireless communications for team cooperation, the robots must apply so-called "learning techniques" to defeat the opposing team.
"We have the images from the cameras on the robots, and the programming that gets the robots to move, but we have to add in all the stuff in between," Lee said. "The robot has to know how to recognize all the in-field cues, make a decision and then finally move."
It's not simple. Aside from the difficulties of the coding -- which uses programming language C++ for basic routines and Perl for higher-order scripting routines -- the robots must be able to function autonomously throughout both 10-minute halves of the soccer game. Team members may not provide input or repair the robots during the game.
"These robots have to function in uncertain, adversarial settings, and what's more, they have to learn from experience. We can't program every single situation and all the possible responses in," Lee said.
To assist fledgling and ongoing robotics development across the world, RoboCup member teams post their source code once the competition is over. Lee referred to this as similar to an "open-source" development environment.
"Great teams like the German team whose code was documented really well ... [would] allow everybody access to their code, and it really helps other teams out," Cohen said.
The RoboCup project is part of a general series of robotics work done by the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Lab at Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science.