Meet three of Penn's silver-medalist athletes.
There's Narcoleptic, who has a habit of randomly falling asleep during games, Twitchy, who shakes back and forth as he runs up and down the field and Frankenstein, who is constructed out of body parts from other athletes who didn't quite make the cut.
At practices in Levine Hall, players have been known to lose limbs.
But don't be alarmed -- these athletes weigh in at a little over three pounds and fight their battles on a tiny soccer field.
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The UPennalizers are a team of four Sony robotic dogs who finished second worldwide at Padua, Italy, this summer in RoboCup, the world's fiercest competition for robotic dog soccer.
RoboCup's rules are similar to the rules of human soccer -- the players work as a team to score goals against a goalie -- but there are only four athletes per team (three field players and a goalie), and the field is only three-by-five meters. Games consist of two 10-minute halves.
The dogs aren't remote-controlled -- they operate autonomously, relying on programmed memory sticks inserted in their bodies to bring them to life.
Each dog retails for around $1,300 and comes equipped with devices that simulate human senses -- including a camera for sight and touch sensors that allow the dog to feel its feet on the ground.
Though the dogs are able to use sound for communication, they mostly rely on wireless ethernet as they play with each other on the field.
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"I got into RoboCup because I thought I could pick up chicks," jokes Engineering and Wharton junior Dave Cohen, the team's movement specialist who designs the dogs' different kicks and motions.
Along with three other engineers, he is responsible for making these dogs come to life.
The team of four -- the smallest among the competitive squads -- speaks about the dogs as parents who spent time teaching their children skills and now must watch them from the sidelines.
"It was pretty much the most nervous experience I've had in my life," Engineering senior Paul Vernaza says. "There's just a sense of loss of control, and there's nothing you can do now but watch. It drives you insane. I was shaking."
Vernaza works on infrastructure in order to make it easier for the other members of the team to do their jobs. As the "handler," Wharton and Engineering senior Yao Hua Ooi is in charge of placing dogs in their starting positions.
"Being the closest one to the dogs, it was really exciting," Ooi says. "I was completely lost in the match the whole time."
The hands-off experience was frustrating for the team.
"At the end I couldn't even watch the final," Cohen says. "I had to go off to the side. I just really wanted to name the dogs 'bastard' and 'asshole' because of all the stress they caused me."
For guidance, the three students look to Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering Professor Daniel Lee.
His enthusiasm and knowledge make him a mentor to the students who work on the team.
"Lee is incredible," Cohen says. "He knows exactly what to do."
Ooi echoes Cohen.
"Dr. Lee codes in his sleep and it still works somehow. He's a genius."
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While their silver-medal performance suggests excellent planning and preparation, a look at the UPennalizers' path to Padua suggests otherwise.
"Basically what they do is give you a bunch of robot dogs and a compiler, and say, 'You have to make these things play soccer.' But they don't give you any code that really would help you to do that," Lee says.
So the team's first task was to teach the dogs simple functions such as how to walk, see the ball and kick.
"If you can't run, you can't kick. You're not going to win," Lee says. "Just like any sport, you have to get the basic fundamentals right to be competitive."
While the Penn squad had an existing program which it had used in previous competitions, the team decided in January to overhaul its code and create a new user-friendly format in time for RoboCup in July.
Vernaza worked 40 hours a week in the four weeks prior to the competition to graft a more simple language, Perl, into the dogs' interface, allowing the team to easily fix errors on the spot.
This new interface proved to be crucial to the team's success, as it prevented the dogs' actions from falling into predictable patterns.
But programming the new language prevented the team from working on other important projects, and when the Quakers arrived in Padua, they were far from ready.
"The main thing we didn't have done was the goalkeeper," Ooi says. "We basically had nothing written when we got there."
But that wasn't all.
Another item on the squad's to-do list was to see if all four robots could play at once.
At Penn, the team trained on a surface that was much rougher than the one in Italy. This misfortune forced Cohen to re-program the dogs to prevent them from slipping. And if that wasn't enough, glitches in the code caused the dogs to run frequently in circles.
"We really didn't know what to expect," Ooi says.
Lack of preparation led to a lack of sleep -- an average of three hours a day -- as the team struggled to complete their code before competition began.
At one point, they spent two and a half straight days at the complex where the competition was held without returning to their hotel.
"By the sixth day we all hit our physical limits," Cohen says.
"They had team meetings every night for all the heads of the teams," Ooi says. "Dr. Lee slept through every meeting so we never knew what was going on."
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Of the 24 teams from around the world competing in RoboCup 2003, Penn was initially considered one of the weaker teams.
"Coming in, we were pretty much unknowns," Ooi says.
However, from the squad's first games, they began to turn some heads, competing closely with some of the most elite squads in the exhibition play.
"It was really surprising for us because they were some of the favorites for the competition and we still had all these major bugs and somehow... it was close," Ooi says.
In the first competitive matches of the RoboCup, the UPennalizers were placed in the toughest pool -- which included the favored German Team, Team ASURA from Japan and the University of Technology Sydney.
"Given that only two teams make it through the pool round, we weren't really confident at all that we would make it through," Ooi says.
Nevertheless, the squad finished second in their group -- scoring 13 goals while only allowing six in round-robin play.
This put Penn into the quarterfinals to take on the University of Science and Technology of China's WrightEagle team.
At the end of regulation, the teams were tied at two and so the game went into penalty kicks.
Penn won, but it was a controversial victory as China's dog accidentally kicked the ball into the wrong goal.
"I think they misinterpreted what the referee's instructions were," Ooi says. "It was very, very devastating for them."
After the match, the Chinese admitted to the UPennalizers that they were surprised by the team's success.
"They claimed that they did a lot of research on the other teams by looking at their Web pages and figuring out what was good about the teams," Ooi says. "After we beat them in the quarterfinals they told us, 'We never [thought] that you guys even had a strong team,' because our Web page was three years old."
The semifinals pitted Penn against Newcastle's NUbots, a team that had just come off of a 13-0 smackdown in the quarterfinals and had scored 77 goals in the competition while allowing none.
"According to them, their goalkeeper had never had to touch the ball," Ooi says.
Leading 2-1 with just over two minutes remaining, Penn surrendered a goal and this match also went to a shootout.
When the dust settled, the UPennalizers came out on top in the shootout, winning 4-3.
Teams are allowed to change their memory stick before a shootout, which often requires a specific code. But Penn never thought to create one of these codes until after the match with China.
"We didn't bother putting one on because we didn't think we'd tie anybody," Cohen says.
In the 10 minutes before the Newcastle match, the team scrambled to program a special shootout memory stick.
"We never tested it," Ooi says. "We just let it go and it worked."
So the underdog UPennalizers went on to the finals against the mighty University of New South Wales' rUNSWift.
"They're kind of the 300-pound gorilla in this league," Lee says.
Weary from grueling competition, three of Penn's dogs were beat up and so the team spent most of its time leading up to the match finding loaner dogs.
Penn came out on fire, scoring in the first minute of play -- only the second goal UNSW allowed all tournament.
"Everyone was just shocked," Vernaza says. "That set the mood for the rest of the game because it was like, 'Okay, these people have a chance.'"
Still, UNSW refused to die, rattling off four consecutive goals.
Yet, just before the first half expired, Penn scored again and netted another goal at the start of the second half to make it 4-3.
"That's when they started getting really nervous," Ooi says. "We were definitely attacking all half."
But 4-3 is how the game would end, stopping this Cinderella journey just short of victory.
Luckily, the team turned more than a few heads by its success.
"I guess the best compliment we got was that we were called 'the stealth team,'" Cohen says.
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But RoboCup is more than just fun and games.
According to the RoboCup Web site, "The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is by 2050 [to] develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world championship team in soccer."
It's something that Lee, and others, are striving toward.
His research mostly concentrates on machine learning and "how we can take what we know about biology... to be able to build machines," he says.
"This RoboCup, having machines play soccer, is in some sense a grand challenge of that," Lee says. "If we can make a machine that plays soccer as well as people do, then that really means we know a lot about what we're doing."
