New technology now allows for the dog days of soccer

Dogs played a little soccer this summer. Robot dogs, that is. RoboCup2000 -- a competition sponsored by Sony where robots go metallic toe to metallic toe to show off the latest in robotics and artificial intelligence -- was held from August 28 through September 3 in Melbourne, Australia. And the Penn RoboCup team, nicknamed the Upennalizers, were there with their mechanical pooch soccer team. The team was led by Mechanical Engineering Professor James Ostrowski and consisted of four students -- Engineering graduate students Ken McIsaac, Sachin Chitta and Aveek Das, as well as a summer student. The four dogs on their team were called Dr. No, Goldfinger, Jaws and Oddjob -- all named for James Bond villains. RoboCup2000 was a large international competition featuring all sorts of robots, both virtual and mechanical, in a wide range of categories. Penn competed in the Sony Legged Robot League, which is geared specifically for enhanced versions of the popular Sony AIBO robot. In the Legged Robot League, teams compete against each other in three-on-three soccer matches. Each team has a goalkeeper and two attackers -- pitting the teams' technical skills and imagination against each other. The Upennalizers programmed the dogs. All movement, vision and sound coordination needed to be programmed beforehand, as the participants could not control the autonomous dogs via remote control during the games. "An amazing amount of information needed to fit into the 8-megabyte memory stick," Ostrowski said. The funding for the purchase of the robots and the travel to Australia was provided by Engineering benefactor Martin Berman, who donated $20,000 for undergraduate research. The Upennalizers received funding from this donation. They worked out of the General Robotics and Sensory Perception Lab. Penn, sadly, did not make it past the first round. It lost 2-1 to Laboratoire de Robotique de Paris and 2-0 to Universita di Roma. The Paris team lost 10-0 in the finals to the hometown favorite, University of New South Wales. Ostrowski attributed Penn's lack of success to "some programming but also to chance and bad luck." However, Ostrowski -- coordinator of next year's competition in Seattle -- remained optimistic. "We've got a team that's competitive with all but the top two teams in the entire 16-team field." The team will also go to Monterrey, Mexico, this November to compete in a demo match against Carnegie Mellon University, the only other U.S.-based team in the league. Currently, the team owns four dogs and has one on loan from Johns Hopkins University. It hopes to purchase one more, pending funding, so that they can have practice games. The students were also happy they got to take part in the competition. "It was a nice experience, because more than just the competition, it was also a learning experience," said Chitta, who plans on going to next year's competition in Seattle. "We got to talk with other teams to see what we can pick up from them, and other teams also learned from us," he added.