The Robocup Physical Agent Challenge: Phase I

Traditional AI research has not given due attention to the important role that physical bodies play for agents as their interactions produce complex emergent behaviors to achieve goals in the dynamic real world. The RoboCup Physical Agent Challenge provides a good testbed for studying how physical bodies play a signi cant role in realizing intelligent behaviors using the RoboCup framework [Kitano, et al., 95]. In order for the robots to play a soccer game reasonably well, a wide range of technologies needs to be integrated and a number of technical breakthroughs must be made. In this paper, we present three challenging tasks as the RoboCup Physical Agent Challenge Phase I: (1) moving the ball to the speci ed area (shooting, passing, and dribbling) with no, stationary, or moving obstacles, (2) catching the ball from an opponent or a teammate (receiving, goal-keeping, and intercepting), and (3) passing the ball between two players. The rst two are concerned with single agent skills while the third one is related to a simple cooperative behavior. Motivation for these challenges and evaluation methodology are given.