Will Stokes

Nicole-Jeanne Schlegel '00, Will Stokes '02 and Mike Babish MEng'01 proudly display the trophy Cornell earned by winning first place in the small robots league of the 2000 Robocup competition in Melbourne.

After a barn-burner semi-final match against Singapore, Cornell's Big Red team beat a tough German team to take first place in the Small Robots League in Robocup, the World Cup of robotic soccer, held Aug. 28 through Sept. 2 in Melbourne, Australia. The team successfully defended the championship it won in 1999.

This year, the Cornell team, again coached by Raffaello D'Andrea, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, succeeded largely by making on-the-spot modifications to the hardware and software of the robots.

The competition is designed to foster development of robotics and artificial intelligence. In the Small Robots League in which Cornell competes, teams of up to five robots up to about five inches in diameter chase a golf ball around on a field the size of a regulation ping-pong table, entirely under computer control.

Last year Cornell fielded powerful, fast-moving robots. This year the students opted for finesse, modifying the robots to move smoothly in any direction and adding a dribbling mechanism.

"This is clearly not what people were expecting," D'Andrea reported from Australia. "Last year's team was strong, quick, and played a hard, fast game. It was clearly the expectation of the competition and crowds that we would build upon that strength to retain our title. This year's team, however, has traded strength and quickness for maneuverability and control, and the Cornell game has progressed from one of pure athleticism to one of finesse and grace. In other words, in '99 we played like England; this year, we play like Brazil."

The humans and machines of the Cornell Robocup team

The first game against France ended in a tie. In following games, Cornell beat Melbourne 7-0 and New Zealand 40-0 to advance to a quarter-final rematch with France. Excellent defense by both teams held the score at 0-0 until "SuperKick," a robot in which the Cornell team modified the solenoid kicking mechanism to fire twice as hard as the other robots, scored a single goal to win the game 1-0.

The semifinal with Singapore, D'Andrea said, "will go down as the best match of Robot Soccer to date." Tight defense on both sides held the score to 0-0. A five-minute overtime still produced no score, and the game was decided on penalty shots. The score climbed to 4-4, leading to "sudden death." Cornell's programming outfoxed the Singapore goalie: the Cornell robot aimed toward the right side of the net, the Singapore goalie moved to intercept, and the Cornell robot turned and shot to the left. Cornell won, 5-4.

The final was a rematch against the FU-Fighters from the Free University of Berlin, the team Big Red defeated 14-0 in last year's final. The German team was vastly improved, D'Andrea reported, and the first half ended 0-0. After both teams made programming changes on the fly, Cornell scored five minutes into the second half, then scored a penalty shot by using the same feinting strategy it had used against Singapore to win the game 2-0.

Team members who traveled to Melbourne for this year's competition were master of engineering candidates Mark Schwager '00, Tobias Welge-Luessen '00, Bryan Audiffred '00, Saeed Saeed '00 and Nicole Schlegel '00, and undergraduates Will Stokes '02, Michael Babish '01 and Josh Pollak '99.

Others on the Robocup team who worked on the project throughout the 1999-2000 school year were undergraduates Michael A. Sherback, Abraham Heifets, Janjarat (Nok) Onlamai, Amanda Waack, Xiaozheng Zhong, Chin Hong Tong, Yin (Sandra) Yu, Eugene Foo, Emily Winston, Matthew Connolly, Christopher Crockett, Mikhail Falkovich, Nan Kong, Abhishek Uppal, Yuan-Luen (Luke) Chuang, Kevin Scharpenberg and Alison Sheets, all members of the class of '00, and graduate students Tama's Kalma'r-Nagy, Pritam Ganguly and Thibet Rungrotkitiyot.