Bots Bring Home Gold, Bronze

Carnegie Mellon University's teams of soccer-playing robots have again taken top spots at the annual International RoboCup Federation competition, held this year in Atlanta.

Taking the gold in the small-sized robot league for the second consecutive year, the CMDragons are again world champions. The CMDash AIBO team brought home the bronze with third place in the legged league.

Manuela Veloso, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor and co-creator of the first RoboCup competition 10 years ago, reported a "stressful and emotional" finish for both teams: critical games were won in penalty shots after overtime periods.

James Bruce, who led the Dragons to win the world championship, finished his Ph.D. in December 2006 and has been hired by Google. Bruce's teammates included Stefan Zickler, a second-year Ph.D. student in computer science, and research engineer Michael Licitra.

"Stefan developed a fantastic robot defense and goalie, which turned out to be particularly crucial in the final game," said Veloso. "Michael who built last year's Dragon team robots – the best ever seen at RoboCup — helped us to make history as the first winning RoboCup team to use the same robot hardware in two consecutive years."

Juan Fasola, who led the AIBO CMDash team, is a fifth-year computer science student and has been working with Veloso since he was a freshman.

"Juan has been a member of several AIBO teams that have brought home honors and trophies," said Veloso. "The CMDash'07 bronze place is his first RoboCup International trophy."

Fasola's team included computer science students Michael Phillips, Gregory Delmar and Somchaya Liemhetcharat.

Related Links: Press Release  |  RoboCup  |  Veloso on RoboCup [.MOV]

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