Carnegie Mellon University won a soccer championship at the RoboCup 2006 World Championship early this month in Germany, and also spectators' hearts, with robots that provided color commentary during robotic soccer games.

The success of Carnegie Mellon robots on the international stage has inspired university officials to push technology to the next step in robotic evolution.

Those projects include robots that can attend meetings on behalf of humans, observe procedures, then instruct people how to do them, and watch over the elderly.

"One scenario is to send a robot to a meeting I cannot attend and tell me what's happening," said Dr. Manuela Veloso, the Herbert Simon Professor of Computer Science and head of Carnegie Mellon's RoboCup teams. "Another scenario is taking care of the elderly. There are many situations ... they can address."

During RoboCup, held June 14-18 in Bremen, Germany, Carnegie Mellon's small-robot team dominated the competition, bettering 19 other teams. It compiled a 53-3 scoring advantage in six games, including five shutouts.

Dr. Veloso attributed the robots' success to "a remarkable demonstration of hardware and software for robot control."

At Carnegie Mellon, Stefan Zickler, a first-year doctoral student, Michael Licitra, a research engineer, and James Bruce, a doctoral candidate, developed hardware and software that overwhelmed the competition.

"For some time, CMU has had very good software, but they closed the gap this year in hardware," said Dr. Tucker Balch, an associate professor of computer science at Georgia Tech University. "Their robots had the minds of champions for years, but not the bodies. This year they had both."

RoboCup is an international project to promote artificial intelligence, robotics and related fields through soccer competitions. The goal is to develop humanoid robots capable of beating the human world soccer champions by 2050.

Carnegie Mellon's robots included Ami and Sango -- Sony-brand QRIO robots programmed to watch robotic soccer games and provide color commentary. With help from a referee, they also announced penalties and goals, and entertained during halftime.

They provided commentary only for games involving Sony-brand robots known as Aibos, which are programmed to chase, catch, pass and shoot an orange ball.

Dr. Balch said the robotic versions of football commentators John Madden and Al Michaels "put a much more human face on robot soccer."

The robots were programmed at Dr. Veloso's core research laboratory, CORAL, which focuses on developing robots that cooperate, observe, reason, act and learn.

"They reached a point where they really were very good at presenting all events happening in the game, and they also entertained people at halftime with dances, comments and music," Dr. Veloso said. "They were competing with a loud audience and their synthesized voices were limited in projecting sound, but they did very well.

"Overall they performed flawlessly."

Carnegie Mellon's next step is to program robots to interact better with people, attend meetings, teach tasks to people and observe when troubles occur.

Many of these skills are offshoots of technology developed during the university's participation in RoboCup events.

For example, Mr. Bruce said, Carnegie Mellon's champion soccer robots teach themselves to be better soccer players by improving calibrations and reactions during robot training camps.

"There are definite improvements we'd like to make," he said. "The team aspect still can improve."

Ready to retire from RoboCup competitions he's participated in since 1999, he said he feels like Pittsburgh Steelers running back Jerome Bettis who won the Super Bowl in his last game.

"Maybe it was my last chance to win," he said. "We had done good research work, but it hadn't translated into a win. That pushed us."

Dr. Balch said the level of competition during the small-robot championship has reached a pitch where robots now can defeat people operating robots by remote control in what's become "a really fast game" of soccer.

"It's like a sci-fi league where the robots take over, and people cannot compete any longer," he said.