The DREAMTEAM Project
At RoboCup97 in Nagoya, Japan: from left to right: Wei-Min
Shen, Hadi Moradi, Jafar Adibi,
Bonghan Cho, Sheila
Tejada, Rogelio Adobbati,
and Behnam Salemi
The exploits of USC's prize-winning robot soccer teams in RoboCup97,
held in Nagoya, Japan, made news around the world. CNN was on the
scene Aug. 29 with coverage that included on-camera interviews with
mid-size robot league world champion team leader Wei-Min Shen, and
team members Sheila Tejada and Rogelio Addobatti. Other stories
appeared in European wire services such as Agence France- Presse,
Reuters, and Deutsche Presse-Agentur, as well as all major Japanese
newspapers and wire services, the Xinhua Chinese news service, the
BBC, and the American Associated Press, whose story mentioning Shen
was reprinted all over the United States. (L.A.'s own City News
Service began its story: ''USC is not just a football powerhouse!'')
Coverage also appeared in major world papers such as Le Monde, the
Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad, the Canberra Times (Australia) and the
German national paper SonntagsZeitung, which noted admiringly that,
''Each with a built-in Pentium processor, the 'kids' of Wei-Min Shen
shot six goals in two first round matches.'' Locally, the USC
victories (which also included a third-place finish by Milind Tambe in
the simulation division) were covered by both radio and television
stations, such as KNX, KCBS (which reported USC had ''trounced its
first opponent'') and KTLA; and network outlets, such as ABC's ''Good
Morning America.'' News of the team came as no surprise to readers of
the Los Angeles Times, which ran a long feature Aug. 18 before the
team left. That story, headlined ''USC Sends Robot Athletes to Match
in Japan,'' discussed in detail the efforts of Information Sciences
Institute artificial intelligence expert Shen and students to field
their ''dream team'' of five autonomous, rollerskate-sized automata,
named after the five members of the cartoon family, the Simpsons.
CNN's coverage in Nagoya Japan
The DreamTeam project at USC/ISI
consists of a group of young (and one not so young) researchers who share
a passion for autonomous systems that can bootstrap their knowledge of
real environments by exploration, experimentation, learning, and discovery.
Our goal is to create a team of mobile agents that can autonomously learn
from its environment based on its own actions, percepts, and missions.
We demostrated our mobile agents during the RoboCup
tournament, held during IJCAI'97
in Nagoya, Japan. Soccer-playing robot
teams from around the world competed head-to-head for the coveted trophy.
Our DreamTeam scored 8 of the overall 9 goals in
the tournament, finished the tournament ranked
#1, and shared the Championship honors with Osaka's.
Our perfect player should play like this...
...but our current robots look like this:
DreamTeam in the News
Article in the Los Angeles Times 8/18/97
Feature article in
the USC Chronicle
USC Chronicle article
about media coverage of DreamTeam
CNN's coverage in Nagoya Japan
Publications
Towards Integrated Soccer Robots, AI Magazine, Spring 1998 Download
(PostScript)
Autonomous Soccer Robots, Paper Collection for RoboCup'97, Lecture Notes
in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 1998. Download
(PostScript)
Mobile Robots for Soccer Competition, to appear in the Proceedings
of 1998 International Conference on Robotics and Automation Download
(Word 7.0)
A Integrated Soccer Robot Team, a poster at the 1998 International Conference
on Multiple Agent Systems Download (Word 7.0)
Autonomous Soccer Robots, Presentation at the RoboCup'97 Workshop. Download
(PostScript)
Totally Autonomous Soccer Robots (A 4-page description before the competition)
Download (PostScript)
System Descriptions
Each robot in our team is based on a battery-powered R/C model car controlled
by a single-board 586 computer by AXIOM
Technology hooked to a color digital camera (QuickCam
by Connectix).
More pictures of our robots
How to make and use linux for our robots
How to install linux on robot?
Mailing Address
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USC/Information Sciences Institute
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4676 Admiralty Way
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Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
-
USA
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(310) 822-1511
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(310) 822-0751 (fax)
visitors since April 1, 1997
DreamTeam Project(dreamteam@isi.edu)
Last modified: May 5, 1998, by Rogelio
Adobbati