Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771 

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM 

Monday, February 28, 2000 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium 

Peter Stone

ABSTRACT -- RoboCup (The Robot Soccer World Cup) is an attempt to promote artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics research by providing a common task, soccer, for evaluation of various theories, algorithms, and agent architectures.  An ongoing international initiative currently involving more than 500 participants from over 20 different countries, RoboCup has conducted three international competitions and workshops and is a growing challenge domain for AI and robotics.  Past competitions have been staged using a complex software simulation, two different sizes of wheeled robots, and SONY AIBO (4-legged) robots -- each of which has encouraged different challenging and innovative research directions.  The long-term goal is to foster the creation of humanoid robots that can compete against the best human soccer teams by the year 2050.  This talk gives an overview of the RoboCup initiative, as well as insight into the research behind some of the past winning teams.  Information about RoboCup is available at www.robocup.org.

SPEAKER -- Peter Stone is a Senior Technical Staff Member in the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department at AT&T Labs Research.  He received his Ph.D. in 1998 and his M.S. in 1995 from Carnegie Mellon University, both in Computer Science.  He received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1993.  Peter's research interests include planning and machine learning, particularly in multiagent systems.  His doctoral thesis research contributed a flexible multiagent team structure and multiagent machine learning techniques for teams operating in real-time noisy environments in the presence of both teammates and adversaries.  He is currently continuing his investigation of multiagent learning at AT&T Labs.  Peter is a member of the RoboCup International Executive Committee and a member of four RoboCup championship teams over the past three years.  His homepage is available at www.research.att.com/~pstone.