Robocup 98

A team of five Yale undergraduates competed in Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, held in "Cité des Sciences," a national science museum in Paris, July 4-8, 1998. The robot soccer match attracted 20 teams from Australia, Colombia, Germany, Iran, Italy, Japan, France, Portugal, and US (four teams). The competition was sponsored by Sony, NAMCO, and SUNX. The annual event (since 1997; the next competition will be held in Stockholm) seeks to foster Artificial Intelligence and intelligent robotic research by providing a problem where a wide range of technologies must be integrated and examined.

The Yale team was the the youngest (age: 21 to 23) and the only team composed of undergraduates. Winning two of their 3 games, they advanced into the single elimination part of the tournament (the best finish of US teams in the Middle Size League), "an excellent showing for a first effort". The Yale team of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science majors included Terry Mallberg, Reiko Ann Miura, Neil Inala, Jaime Teevan, and research programmer Christopher Cantor. The Yale team was sponsored by the four departments of the Faculty of Engineering and the Computer Science department, with additonal support from the Yale Science and Engineering Association and Nomadic Technologies, a robot company from California.

In order to play a game of robotic soccer, the Yale team had to develop algorithms for an independent Vision system and for a Global Coordination process, so that robots could get hints from a central server via radio links; the team also wrote software to provide local control for each robot. Terry Mallberg '98 had been responsible for hardware and strategy, John-Anthony Owens '98 and Christopher Cantor developed vision software, Neil Inala '98 worked on global coordination and communication, Reiko Ann Miura '98 was responsible for the goalie and sensor fusion modules, and Jaime Teevan '98 worked on local control. Also involved with the project during the school year were Angela Chan '98, Brenda Ng '99, Josh Davis '98, Charlie Foster '98, and Leonard Law '98. Prof. Gregory Hager, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and Prof. David Kriegman, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, were the faculty advisors.

For more information, visit
<joyce.eng.yale.edu/Robocup> 

the Sony website
<www.world.sony.com/dream/robocup> and

the official Robocup webpage
<www.robocup.org>