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

USC in the News: A Robotic Soccer Roust (September 15, 1997)

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

USC/Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
USA
(310) 822-1511
(310) 822-0751 (fax)

visitors since April 1, 1997

DreamTeam Project([email protected]


Last modified: May 5, 1998, by Rogelio Adobbati