Robot Soccer is enjoying unprecedented international interest and success. RoboCupis an international research and education initiative. Its goal is to foster intelligent agent and mobile robot research by providing a complex, but crafted, problem where a wide range of technologies can be examined, integrated, and most importantly compared. This talk will outline the objectives of RoboCup, and the nature of SONY AIBO Robot Soccer. The scientific challenges involved in building a team of robots capable of playing soccer in real time will be described and illustrated using movie clips from recent matches. Some of the challenges are operational, e.g. robot locomotion and robot localization, some involve collaboration, e.g. passing the ball, and others are strategic, e.g. what information should be shared amongst the team in order to create competitive advantage.

The grand vision of RoboCup is to build a team of robots that can out play the human FIFA World Cup team by 2050. One of the major challenges that will need to be addressed in order to achieve this dream is the development ofrobots that can represent and reason about their own capabilities, and that know what they are doing. In pursuing the objective to build a team of robots that know they are playing soccer, solving the perception grounding problem becomes paramount. Mary-Anne< will describe a new grounding framework developed by her team together with John McCarthy of Stanford University and Peter Gardenfors of Lund University, Sweden