Overview of RoboCup-99

RoboCup-99, the third Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, was held in conjunction with IJCAI-99 in Stockholm. Robo-Cup has now clearly demonstrated that it provides a remarkable framework for advanced research in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. The yearly RoboCup event has included a technical workshop and competitions in different leagues. This chapter presents a comprehensive overview of RoboCup-99 and the scientific and engineering challenges presented to the participating researchers. There were four RoboCup-99 competitions: the simulation league, the small-size robot league, the middle-size robot league, and, for the first time officially, the Sony legged robot league. The champion teams were CMUnited-99 (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) for the simulation league, Sharif CE (Sharif University of Technology, Iran) for the middle-size league, Big Red (Cornell University, USA) for the small-size league, and “Les 3 Mousquetaires” (Laboratoire de Robotique de Paris, France) for the Sony legged robot league. The Scientific Challenge Award was given to three papers on innovative research for the automated statistical analysis of the games, from the University of Southern California (ISI/USC), USA, the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL), Japan, and Chubu University, Japan. There will be the first RoboCup European Championship in Amsterdam in May 2000, and the International RoboCup-2000 will take place in Melbourne, Australia, in August 2000.