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Robots learn teamwork, thanks to soccer
Monday, July 12, 1999 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The idea of robots working together -- central to a Carnegie Mellon University/NASA concept for building and maintaining space-based solar power stations -- was something almost unheard of only a few years ago.
The fact that robotic teamwork is taken seriously today is at least partly due to something as seemingly frivolous as a soccer game -- robotic soccer, that is.
Since 1997, computer scientists and roboticists have been gathering for an international competition called the Robocup. The ultimate goal is to develop robots that within 50 years could beat the human World Cup champions, but the immediate impact has been to show that robots can work together.
"When we started, there was no awareness of the use of multiple robots," said Manuela Veloso, an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and the leader of the university's three Robocup teams. "People were focusing on a single robot -- Dante going down in a volcano, Sojourner landing on Mars."
In last year's Robocup competition in Paris, all three of the teams, called CMUnited, won their respective categories and a large part of that success could be attributed to teamwork, Veloso said.
"We were the only ones who scored goals by passing," she noted. In other teams, when one robot was handling the ball, the others would be passive. But the CMUnited players were always active, positioning themselves to help the team even when they didn't have the ball. "Probably 80 percent of our goals came from passes."
CMUnited will be back this year when the Robocup resumes July 27 in Stockholm, Sweden. They include a team in the small robot category -- each robot about the size of a softball -- a legged robot team that uses Sony "dog" robots and a simulator team that dispenses with hardware and simply pits software program against software program.
In each category, the robots work autonomously. Human members, who program the robots and/or keep them working mechanically, include graduate student Michael Bowling and research scientist Sorin Achim on the small robot team, graduate students Elly Winner and Scott Lenser and undergraduate Jim Bruce on the legged robot team and graduate student Peter Stone and undergraduate Patrick Riley on the simulator team.
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