The Standard Platform League

The Standard Platform League is unique among RoboCup soccer leagues for its focus on software. Since all teams compete using the same hardware (a standard robotic platform), success is predicated on software quality, and the shared hardware makes quality judgments simpler and more objective. Growing out a league based on the Sony AIBO quadruped robots, the league has constantly evolved while moving ever closer to playing by human rules, and currently features the Aldebaran NAO humanoid robots. The hallmark of the league has been a focus on individual agents’ skills, such as perception, localization, and motion, at the expense of more team-oriented skills, such as positioning and passing. The league has begun to address this deficiency with the creation of the Drop-in Challenge, where robots from multiple teams will work together. This new focus should force teams to work on multi-agent coordination in more abstract and general terms and promises to create fruitful new lines of research.