RoboCup : RoboCup-99 Stockholm

Call for Proposal
RoboCup-99 Sony Legged Robot League

July 29 --- August 6, 1999, in conjunction with IJCAI-99 Stockholm

Prepared by the RoboCup-99 Legged Robot League Committee:
Minoru Asada, Osaka University
Dominique Duhaut, University of Paris-6
Masahiro Fujita, Sony D21 Laboratory
Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University

1. Objectives

RoboCup is an initiative to provide a research platform to integrate Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. RoboCup includes competitions and emphasizes the underlying research through a RoboCup workshop.
RoboCup-97 and RoboCup-98 included three different leagues, namely simulation, small-sized and middle-sized robots.

For the last couple of years, Sony has been developing a remarkable robotic platform, namely the Sony legged robots. In 1998, together with RoboCup-98, Sony provided their robots to three research teams to have the robots play robotic soccer, namely University of Osaka, Paris University, and Carnegie Mellon University. Games were very successful. The teams demonstrated research in automated calibration for color segmentation, balanced robust legged walking, landmark-based probabilistic localization, and behavior learning by instruction.

This is a call for proposals to use the Sony legged robots to participate in RoboCup-99. Participation in RoboCup-99 will also involve the submission of a paper describing the research underlying the approach developed.

The RoboCup-99 Sony legged robot league will take place in a green colored carpeted field, with colored landmarks and goals. The game will be 3 on 3 robots using a small orange ball. The technical challenges of this league involve: color segmentation, localization, and individual and team strategy. The interested proponents are encouraged to acquire further information about RoboCup and about the Sony legged robots from the RoboCup Web page, http://www.robocup.org/, as well as from the technical publications.

2. Guidelines for the Proposal Submission

Proposals need to include:

Clear statement of research interests.
Proposed approach to address the RoboCup challenge.
Background of the principal investigator.
Description of the team organization and effort to be spent.
Pointers to relevant publications.
Statement of commitment to enter RoboCup-99 in Stockholm, including known sources of financial support for the participation of the team.

The proposals will be evaluated based on the strength of the qualifications of the team, and of the proposed approach. An additional criteria will be based on the location of the proposing institution, as we would like to have representation from different parts of world, as much as possible.

Proposals are to be submitted by email with a maximum of 5 pages to the RoboCup-99 Sony Legged Robot Committee, robocup-legged-com@pdp.crl.sony.co.jp

The deadline for submission of proposals is November 30, 1998.
Decisions will be made by December 15, 1998. Selected teams will need to sign a confidentially agreement with Sony. The Sony legged robots will be made available to the selected teams in February 1999.

Here are the conditions when we provide our robots.

Sony will provide each team with 4 robots and 1 licence of SDK (Software Development Kit).
The teams must participate in RoboCup-99 Legged Robot League.
Each team is responsible for the costs involved in participating at RoboCup-99, namely travel and living expenses, and any other logistics.
It will cost you for repair services and the parts.

Technical Publications

Masahiro Fujia and Koji Kageyama
"An Open Architecture for Robot Entertainment"
In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, ACM Press, 1997, pp.435-442

Masahiro Fujita, Hiroaki Kitano , and Koji Kageyama
"Reconfigurable Physical Agents"
To appear in the 2nd International conference on Autonomous Agents, 1998

Hiroaki Kitano, Masahiro Fujita, Stephane Zrehen , and Koji Kageyama
"Sony Legged Robot for RoboCup Challenge"
In Proceedings of the IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION, IEEE, 1998, pp.2605-2612

Manuela Veloso, William Uther, Masahiro Fujita, Minoru Asada, and Hiroaki Kitano
"Playing Soccer with Legged Robot"
In Proceedings of the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT ROBOTS AND SYSTEMS, 1998, pp.437-442

The official website for Sony D21 Lab's Entertainment Robot.Here you can keep up with the latest news on the 4-legged Pet-type Robot through detailed technical descriptions, schedule of events, FAQs, and much more. Complete with many photos and video clips and the site is regularly updated.

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