Research Issues Research Issues of RoboCup includes adaptive behaviors, flexible and multi modal cooperative behaviors in multi agents, optimal communication strategies in complex, dynamic, and uncertain real worlds. Especially, physical agent track focuses on the integration of hardware, software, and communication means. RoboCup physical agent challenges are summarized as follows: Perception: The player should observe in realtime the behaviors of other objects which it cannot completely predict or control in order to take an action to deal with them. Such objects include a ball, an opponent, and in some sense, a common-side player, and further a judge. Capabilities of wide range perception, discrimination of other agents, and estimation of their locations and motions coping with occlusions are needed. Such perception is a basic technology to expand the robotic applications. Action: The player needs motion capabilities of quick acceleration/deceleration and turns, and motion stability, skillfulness and powerfulness in kicking a ball or trapping. Some of these requirements are inconsistent with each other. For example, the more powerfully the player likes to kick, the less skillful it is. If we improve the mechanical stiffness to satisfy the both, it would cause the increase of mass and energy which affect other motion capabilities. In addition to this, prohibition of wires and limitations of weight severely affect the mechanical design issues. Therefore, not only the high skill of each motion ability but also the total balance of the whole system are required. Situation and Behavior: The task domain itself is simple, but almost infinite number of situations will occur in accordance with dynamic changes of the relationships in position and relative motion between the ball, the goal, and the players, and the context of the game. The optimal behavior changes from one situation to another. Since our goal is more than a "dumb" soccer playing team, we need abilities beyond simple reflexive behaviors such as situation understanding, tactics selection and modification, minimum communication with common side players, teamwork behaviors acquired through practical training. These issues are closely related to the cognitive issues such as organization of spatio-temporal memory of the world and categorization of sets of motor behaviors into skills (symbols?) grounded by the physical bodies. Realtime: Since the situation rapidly changes according to motions of the ball and other players, there is no time to carefully analyze the situation and deliberate the plan. Therefore, the player should take an action such as kicking a ball immediately dribbling it if surrounded by no opponents in order to wait for the better situation, or moving a certain position to be located to synchronize the common side player's motion. These challenges described above are significant long term ones to realize a good soccer planning robot team, which will take a few decades to meet. However, due to the clarity of the final target, several subgoals can be derived, which define mid term and short term challenges. One of the major reasons why RoboCup is attractive to so many researchers is that it requires the integration of a broad range of technologies into a team of complete agents, as opposed to a task-specific functional module. The long term research issues are too broad to compile as a list of specific items. Nevertheless, the challenges would involve broad range of technological issues ranging from the development of physical components, such as high performance batteries and motors, to highly intelligent real time perception and control software. The mid term technical challenges, which are the target for the next 10 years, can be made more concrete, and a partial list of specific topics can be compiled. Following is a partial list of research areas involved in RoboCup physical agent track, mainly targeted for the mid term time span: agent architecture in general, implementation of realtime and robust sensing, realization of stable and high-speed robot control, sensor fusion, behavior learning for multi agent environment, cooperation in dynamic environment, The RoboCup Physical Agent Challenge shall be understood in the context of larger and longer range challenges, rather than as a one-shot challenge. Thus, we wish to provide a series of short term challenges, which naturally leads to the accomplishment of the mid term and long term challenges. The RoboCup Physical Agent Challenge-97 is the first attempt of this initiative together with the RoboCup Multi Agent Challenge-97.
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