ROBOCUP

Main Collaborators: JinWoo Lee, Oliver Purwin and Michael Sherback

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 robots against each other on a reduced field. The robots must play the game autonomously; there are no human operators.

The Cornell team consisted of a multidisciplinary mix of graduate and undergraduate students from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, operations research and industrial engineering. The team made RoboCup history – the “Big Red Bots” won 4 championship titles over the next several years, retiring from competition in 2005 as the most successful RoboCup team. In the process, they introduced various innovations to the competition: omni-directional vehicles, dribbling, and trajectory generation algorithms for agile robot motions.