As many countries prepare for the World Cup, three George Mason University graduate students in the Department of Computer Science will be preparing for a different international cup in Brazil: RoboCup 2014, an annual robotic soccer competition taking place July 19–25.
PhD students Drew Wicke, David Freelan and Stephen Arnold of George Mason's RoboPatriots team have an unusual plan: Two days before the event, they will teach four blank, autonomous robots how to play collaborative soccer through demonstration, and then compete against other robot teams. Typically, robots are pre-programmed long before their RoboCup debut.
"We are, to our knowledge, the only team in RoboCup ever to have attempted this," says Mason computer science professor Sean Luke, faculty advisor for the RoboPatriots. "We are not interested in winning the competition so much as using RoboCup as a platform for a very difficult research goal."
With a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the students and faculty in Mason's Autonomous Robotics Lab have worked since November to develop machine-learning algorithms and build soccer behaviors for training robots. The two-day training process will take each student between 10 and 15 hours, with an additional 15 to 20 hours each to calibrate for every field.
"The interesting part for me is the cooperative multi-robot learning, where the robots work as a team," says Wicke. "This is an important aspect of soccer and is useful in the progression towards RoboCup's goal of playing in the World Cup in 2050."
The research team hopes their experiment will help advance research in the emerging field of multi-robotics.
"It will be really neat to meet the other teams and get some ideas about how they approach the problem," Wicke says. "We hope to score a couple of goals at least."
You can view the "RoboPatriots" qualifying video for RoboCup 2014 at this website.
This story by Lindsay Kenton appeared on Mason's News Desk, June 3, 2014.
Write to Preston Williams at pwilli20@gmu.edu