RoboCup is an international research and education initiative. Its goal is to foster artificial intelligence and robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be examined and integrated. The concept of soccer-playing robots was first introduced in 1993. In July 1997, the first official conference and competition was held in Nagoya, Japan. Followed by Paris, Stockholm, Melbourne, Seattle and Fukuoka the annual events attracted many participants. Today, more than 3,000 researchers from 35 countries and regions are participating in various projects such as international games, conferences, research and educational programs.

The RoboCup Soccer Simulator is a research and educational tool for multi-agent systems and artificial intelligence. It enables two teams of 11 simulated autonomous robotic players (soft-bots) to play soccer (football).

The First RoboCup Australian Open 2003 tournament and workshop (Simulation League) will take place in Sydney, during the last week of January, 2003 at the University of New South Wales - home of the most successful Australian RoboCuppers!

The event will take two days + setup (half-a-day), with the competition component being run in a typical RoboCup Simulation League environment (please note that only Linux OS will be supported). There are no particular constraints on the number of teams. We also expect this to be a truly Open event, with a number of international entries and a comprehensive participation from Australia. A limited number of remote entries can also be accepted.

Our plan is to have a topical event, focussed on Adaptability in Multi-Agent Systems. In particular, we intend to run a number of standard games (eg., 3) between the same teams, varying the number of the available machines 3-vs-3, 1-vs-1, etc., and using an average-score metrics (for example, taking away the worst result of each team).

A single-day workshop on the same topic will be held in conjunction and immediately after the competition. Its scope is mainly within the field of adaptive multi-agent systems. The workshop will include invited talks and technical paper presentations in a range of areas of interest, including adaptive coordination, resource-bounded reasoning, emergent computation, robust agent architectures, self-organisation in complex systems, etc.

We invite submissions of papers reporting on high quality, original work to the AORC-2003 Workshop. We also invite people who do not actively participate in RoboCup to submit their work on the topics above or related ones. The experimental character of the RoboCup games gives in addition the possibility to get novel ideas and approaches adopted and field-tested by a constantly growing community. Papers describing applied research as well as papers dealing with strong theoretical results are both welcome.

Submitted papers should follow the Springer LNAI format, and are limited to 16 pages. For formatting instructions, take a look at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. We strongly encourage electronic submissions (a postscript or pdf file of the full paper). Submissions are due Nov 15, 2002.

It is not required to submit a paper in order to participate in the competition. Likewise, an intent to participate can be submitted without a workshop paper.

The time-line:

• participation intent and/or paper submission: 15 November 2002 (closed);
• acceptance notification: 6 December 2002 (closed);
• camera-ready copies due: 3 January 2003 (closed);
• set-up, registration and competition: 28-30 January 2003 (Tue-Wed-Thu);
• workshop: 31 January 2003 (Fri).

The 1st RoboCup Australian Open tournament and workshop is a non-profit event, without registration fees.

The Program Committee for the event:

• Aditya Ghose, Wollongong Uni, Australia
• Andrew Jennings, RMIT, Australia
• Abhaya Nayak, Macquarie Uni, Australia
• Ken Nguyen, UNSW, Australia
• Maurice Pagnucco, UNSW, Australia
• Daniel Polani, Uni of Hertfordshire, UK
• Claude Sammut, UNSW, Australia
• Chen Xiaoping, USTC, China
• Mikhail Prokopenko, CSIRO, Australia.