NSF PR 03-47 - April 29, 2003

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NSF Support Helps Start a Robot Soccer Dynasty


Members of the Carnegie Mellon Sony legged-robot RoboCup team, CMPack'02, which won first place at RoboCup 2002 in Fukuoka, Japan. In the final game, CMPack'02 played against the rUNSWift team from the University of New South Wales, Australia. The game ended with a tie of 3-3, and CMPack'02 won the subsequent penalty shoot out with final score, 5-4.
Credit: CMPack'02 research team: Manuela Veloso, Scott Lenser, Douglas Vail, Maayan Roth, Ashley Stroupe and Sonia Chernova. Photo by Debra Tobin.
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CMU-pack02-goal.asf
Caption: This video of the second goal by CMPack’02 shows the efficient pursuit of the ball by the CMPack'02 attacker (in red) and the positioning of the offensive supporter and the defensive supporter.
Credit: CMPack'02 research team: Manuela Veloso, Scott Lenser, Douglas Vail, Maayan Roth, Ashley Stroupe and Sonia Chernova. Video courtesy of Sony.


A member of the Carnegie Mellon's 2002 small-size robot league team, CMDragons'02, which made it to the quarter-finals at RoboCup 2002. The small-size robot teams play soccer with an orange golf ball.
Credit: CMDragons'02 research team: Brett Browning, Manuela Veloso, James Bruce, Michael Bowling and Dinesh Govindaraju. Photo by James Bruce.
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A screenshot of a scrimmage between Carnegie Mellon's simulation teams from 2000 and 1999. CMUnited'99 was the RoboCup’99 simulation champion team and ATTCMUnited'2000 placed third at RoboCup 2000.
Credit: CMUnited'99 and the ATTCMUnited'2000 research team: Peter Stone, Patrick Riley and Manuela Veloso. Screenshot by Patrick Riley.
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ARLINGTON, Va.—Since receiving her doctorate in 1992, Manuela Veloso's research interests in artificial intelligence have focused on duplicating the success with which humans plan, learn and execute tasks. Founding a robot soccer dynasty was purely coincidental, but a logical result of putting her research into practice with her students.

Veloso and her students in the multi-robot CORAL Lab (Cooperate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have pursued research to program a robot—and teams of robots—to make plans, carry them out, and learn from their successes and failures. Not to mention scoring enough goals to win a few robot soccer world championships in the process. Veloso's work has been supported by a 1995 CAREER award and a subsequent 1999 award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent federal agency that supports fundamental research in all fields of science and engineering.

Today, Veloso is a vice president of the international RoboCup Federation and co-chair of the first RoboCup American Open being held at Carnegie Mellon April 30-May 4. In addition, Veloso's students, former students and post-docs are leading or participating on teams from Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, the University of Texas at Austin and, at the international level, from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

"Because of my research interests, I became attracted to multi-robot problems, and test platforms are hard to come by for such problems," said Veloso, a professor of computer science and director of the CORAL Lab. "Robot soccer came later, and it made team problems all the more challenging from a research perspective. What drives me is the multi-robot aspect and the adversarial game domain. It's kind of like chess, but with robots."

RoboCup is an international project to foster advances in artificial intelligence and intelligent robotics research. The ultimate goal of RoboCup is to develop, by 2050, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can beat the human world champion soccer team. Veloso and Carnegie Mellon have been participating since "pre-RoboCup" events in 1996 and the first official RoboCup games in 1997. Veloso was general chair of RoboCup 2001 in Seattle.

This year's American Open will help teams from the Western Hemisphere prepare for RoboCup 2003 in Padua, Italy, July 2-11. "Other regions, particularly Europe, have had opens for several years," Veloso said. "The American Open is a chance for the teams from the Americas to bond more. My vision was to share more amongst ourselves so the Americas could perform better in the international competition."

Teams at the American Open will compete primarily in three leagues. The simulation league pits teams of 11 simulated players against one another on a virtual playing field. In the small-size robot league, teams of five six-inch robots compete on a surface the size of a ping-pong table. Each school designs their own robots within the size restrictions. The four-legged robot league features teams of four Sony AIBO robot dogs, donated by Sony, with each team relying on superior programming to beat their competitors. The international RoboCup competition also includes middle-size robot and humanoid robot leagues.

Led by Veloso, Carnegie Mellon is the 2002 four-legged robot league champion and has been champion in each league several times—simulation champs in 1998 and 1999, small-robot champs in 1997 and 1998, and four-legged robot champs in 1998 and 2002. The reigning small-robot champs are from Cornell University, led by engineering professor Raffaello D'Andrea, another NSF CAREER grantee.

"It keeps getting harder and harder to win every year," Veloso said. "My students finish their Ph.D.'s, and they end up going to other schools where they become some of our stronger competitors. And since this is a research project, we make our code freely available, so anyone can start where we were last June. In many ways, we may have to play against ourselves."

At the American Open, Carnegie Mellon's teams will compete against Georgia Tech and the University of Texas at Austin in the four-legged robot league, and against Texas in the simulation league. Georgia Tech's team is led by Veloso's former post-doctoral researcher, Tucker Balch, and the Texas teams are led by Veloso's former graduate student Peter Stone. At the international level, Veloso's former graduate student, Will Uther, participates on the team from the University of New South Wales in Australia, which finished second to Carnegie Mellon in the four-legged robot league at RoboCup 2002.

"I can't imagine having had a better advisor than Manuela," said Stone, now an assistant professor of computer science, whose own 2003 NSF CAREER award will be used, in part, to support his RoboCup-related research. "She provided all the resources needed to get us to, and keep us at, the forefront of the emerging international RoboCup community. She taught me how to balance research with this sort of activity, and she instructed me in all aspects of being a full-fledged participant in the scientific community."

Carnegie Mellon is fielding several teams in the American Open, all led by Veloso's graduate students. Doug Vail leads the legged-robot team, Patrick Riley leads entries in the team and coach simulation leagues, and James Bruce is leading a team in the small-size robot league with robots designed by Veloso's colleague Brett Browning, a systems scientist with the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon and co-chair of the American Open. Other students in the teams include Scott Lenser, Michael Bowling, Sonia Chernova and Michael Skolosky. Currently the RoboCup opens are not qualifying events for the International RoboCup, and any team can go on to participate in the International RoboCup. However, that may change in the future.

"I'm very happy when I see a particular research solution succeed" no matter which team makes it happen, Veloso said. This year, for example, Carnegie Mellon is evaluating different kicking methods as well as various teamwork algorithms to include a better response to the opposing team. "I think we [Carnegie Mellon] will do well, but I refuse to make a prediction on who will win," she joked. "I do predict, however, that we'll see some key advances in the science of autonomous robots."

-NSF-

CMU CORAL research group: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral/
CMU MultiRobot Lab: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~multirobotlab/
RoboCup: http://www.robocup.org/02.html

Principal Investigator: Manuela Veloso, 412-268-1474, [email protected]

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