UNSW'S SOCCER-PLAYING ROBOTS WIN AGAIN

UNSW's soccer-playing robots, and their programmers, have done it again! A UNSW student team early Saturday morning (Australian east coast time) successfully defended its world title at RoboCup 2001 in Seattle, Washington. RoboCup is an international sporting and scientific event that features autonomous soccer-playing and rescue robots of all shapes and sizes.

In an extremely strong performance, the four undergraduate engineering students, Martin Siu, Spencer Chen, Tom Vogelgesang and Tak Fai Yik, won the Sony Legged Robot League for the second year in a row. In the six games they played, the UNSW team scored a total of 64 goals, with only three scored against them, one of which was an own goal. They defeated Carnegie Mellon University (from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) 9 to 2 in the final.

This year the teams programmed robo-cats, or "lions", as UNSW called them, to play soccer autonomously on a miniature soccer field. As Professor Claude Sammut from UNSW's School of Computer Science and Engineering, explained: "The robo-cats' performance is only as good as the artificial intelligence the students build into them. They are very complex robots that the students must program to be able to think and react spontaneously to their surroundings, to each other and to the opposing team."

Professor Sammut supervised the UNSW team which had technical assistance from post-graduate students Bernhard Hengst and Son Pham, both members of UNSW's successful team at last year's RoboCup.

Fifteen teams from other leading universities around the world competed this year.

UNSW also took out the RoboCup Challenge, for the third year in a row. The Challenge is a time trial event, with three challenges demonstrating the Lions' various soccer skills.

Head of the School of Computer Science, Professor Arun Sharma, said the team's double win was a great achievement considering that all teams were required to release their research outcomes and the source code after each year's competition. "Even more remarkable is that each year we have fielded an entirely new team of undergraduate students who are mentored by members of the previous year's team."

CONTACT DETAILS: Professor Sammut, tel. (02) 9385 6932, Bernhard Hengst, UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering, tel. (02) 9385 6940; Amanda Hainsworth, UNSW Public Affairs, tel. (02) 9385 2873.

Date issued: 14 August 2001