Billing itself as an international research and education initiative whose goal is to foster artificial intelligence and robotics research, the RoboCup soccer challenge pits teams of up to five robots against each other on a reduced field. The robots must play the game autonomously; there are no human operators.
In 1998, D’Andrea took a scouting trip to see the RoboCup championship in Paris. What he saw there was interesting: most of the competing teams were focused on strategy of play - using RoboCup as a test-bed for artificial intelligence - but they lacked sophisticated movement to match their strategy.
It was as though, D’Andrea recalls, he was watching eight-year-old brains playing with four-year-old bodies. Seeing the potential in RoboCup to bridge the gap between the worlds of Artificial Intelligence and Dynamics & Control, D’Andrea decided he would enter a team in the competition the following year.
RoboCup also fit well with D’Andrea’s teaching agenda: to give his students a taste of what it was like to work as a team member on large-scale projects like the ones they might some day encounter in industry.
Newly appointed as assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, D’Andrea chose a multidisciplinary mix of graduate and undergraduate students from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, operations research and industrial engineering to work on the project. Their goal was ambitious: to win RoboCup 1999 as newcomers to the competition.
A mere 9 months after students began the project, and much to the surprise of seasoned veterans, the ‘Big Red Bots’ of Cornell University won the annual RoboCup soccer competition in Stockholm. (You can read all about how the underdogs beat out the tournament favorites here.)
Best of "Big Red" at RoboCup, 1999-2003.
He had propelled his students into making RoboCup history – the “Big Red Bots” would win 4 championship titles over the next several years - but it wasn’t just the first-place prize the Cornell team had captured.
Back home, faculty and administration had also caught the RoboCup high. Seeing how students could achieve large-scale success when they collaborated with colleagues in other departments, more than a dozen multi-disciplinary teams sprang up, competing in everything from the design of autonomous underwater vehicles to the building and launching of autonomous satellite systems.
Interdisciplinary projects with the opportunity for hands-on engineering became hugely popular at Cornell and D’Andrea received several departmental and campus-wide teaching awards, including the prestigious 2005 Cornell College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award.
More importantly, however, he had captured the spirit of possibility amongst his students. According to one former RoboCup team member, “This was by far the most exciting class I’ve ever taken. It’s a pretty daunting task to get robots to do anything autonomously. I got a real sense of how to go about designing a system from the ground up."
Says another, “Doing something like RoboCup, you’re not using technology that’s fully resolved or fully in the literature. You look at what’s out there, and if nothing fits the application you want to do, you have to create a solution of your own … You really need to solve a problem, to take things you learned in your undergraduate career and apply them in a real way.”
