Teams of soccer-playing robots will compete on campus Thursday, May 4, for the honor of representing Cornell in the RoboCup, the fourth annual World Cup of Robotic Soccer, in August.
The Cornell competition will be open only to invited guests. The contest, to be held in the flexible theater of the Center for Theatre Arts, actually will be between two teams of engineering students who have spent several months designing, building and testing the robots.
One team has worked with the robots that last year won the world competition in Stockholm for Cornell, adding to and improving on the original design. The other team has started from scratch with a completely new design. There will be no real winners or losers; after the local contest, the best features of both designs will be combined into the robots Cornell will enter in this year's World Cup event to be held in Melbourne, Australia, starting Aug. 28, and both teams of students will work on the final version.
The international RoboCup competition was created to foster research in robotics and artificial intelligence. Cornell competes in the "small" league, where battery-powered robots about a quarter the size of a breadbox maneuver on a playing field the size of a regulation ping-pong table. The ball is a regulation golf ball. Once the game begins, the players are entirely under computer control, with no physical human intervention. A video camera above the field informs the computer of the positions of the ball and all the "players," and the computer in turn directs the small machines by radio as they dart about at speeds up to one meter per second. The contest is a test both of mechanical and electrical design and of programming skill.
Cornell's teams include mechanical and electrical engineering students and computer science students. Raffaello D'Andrea, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and adviser to the teams, said this is why Cornell won so easily last year, the first time it entered RoboCup. Most other teams, he said, consisted entirely of computer scientists, and Cornell's better-engineered machines outplayed them. This year, he said, the competition will probably be tougher, since others may have lifted some of Cornell's ideas.
For the local competition, the teams have been nicknamed "Brazil '00" and "Italy '00." Members of Brazil '00 are Scott Aaronson '00; Bryan Audiffred, graduate student; Eugene Foo '00; Abraham Heifets '01; Supat Ieamsupapong '00; Brett Nadler '01; Saeed Saeed, grad student; Will Stokes '01; Chin Hong Tong, grad student; Amanda Waack '00; Emily Winston '00; Yin Yu, grad student; and Xiaozheng Zhong '00.
Italy '00 consists of Kevin Scharpenberg '00; Luke Chuang, grad student; Alison Sheets '00; Tobias Welge-Luessen, grad student; Mark Schwager, grad student; Mike Sherback '00; Mikhail Falkovich, grad student; Janjarat Onlamai, grad student; Nan Kong, grad student; Matthew Connolly, grad student; Abhishek Uppal, grad student; Christopher Crockett, grad student; Philip Zigoris '04; Nicole Schlegel '00; Eric Strong '00; and Michael Babish '00.
Last year's RoboCup victory is recounted at www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicles/8.12.99/robot_soccer.html.
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