THE ROBOCUP PHYSICAL AGENT CHALLENGE - PHASE-I

Traditional Al research has not give due attention to the important ro le that physical bodies play for agents as their interactions produce complex emergent behaviors to achieve goals in the dynamic real world. The RoboCup Physical Agent Challenge provides a good test bed for stu dying how physical bodies play a significant role in realizing intelli gent behaviors using the RoboCup framework (kitano et al., 1995). In o rder for the robots to play a soccer game reasonably well, a wide rang e of technologies needs to be integrated, and a number of technical br eakthroughs must be made. In this article, we present three challengin g tasks as the RoboCup Physical Agent Challenge Phase I: (1) moving th e ball to the specified area (shooting, passing, and dribbling) with n o, with stationary, or with moving obstacles; (2) catching the ball fr om an opponent or a teammate (receiving, goal keeping, and interceptin g); and (3) passing the ball between two players. The first two tasks are concerned with single-agent skills, while the third is related to a simple cooperative behavior. Motivation for these challenges and eva luation methodology is given.