The first official RoboCup games and conference

Background

The plan behind RoboCup was announced at IJCAI-95 in Montreal: the games would be organised together with IJCAI-97 in Nagoya.^[1] The organisers allowed two years of preparation and development time before that date, so that teams could start work on real robots and on simulation entries, and fit the effort into their funding schedules.^[1] That gap between announcement and first event gave research groups room both to build hardware and to write the software agents that would compete in the simulated competition.

The first official games and conference

The first official RoboCup games and conference took place in 1997 and, in the federation's own history, were a great success.^[1] More than 40 teams took part, counting the real-robot and simulation competitions together, and more than 5,000 spectators attended.^[1]

The two tracks ask different things of their entrants. In the real-robot competition, teams bring physical mobile robots that move around a field and play against one another; in the simulation competition, the players are programs, and matches are run inside a computer. Running both at a single event meant that a team without the budget for a full robot squad could still compete, and that ideas tested in software could be compared with what happened on the physical field.

Robot football is hard for reasons that are easy to state and difficult to solve. A player has to perceive the ball, the goal and the other robots; it has to decide what to do quickly; and it has to move in a way that actually carries out the decision. Add several robots on each side and the problem includes cooperation and keeping track of a game that changes constantly. A match also produces a score that anyone can read, which is why a football field works as a test bed for robotics and artificial intelligence research.

1997 as a turning point

RoboCup's history treats 1997 as a turning point, and records two other developments from the same year alongside the first games: in May, IBM's Deep Blue defeated the human world chess champion, and on July 4 NASA's Mars Pathfinder deployed the Sojourner rover.^[1] The three are listed together as what set that year apart.

The goal it started from

The federation describes the 1997 event as RoboCup's first steps toward developing robotic soccer players that could beat a human World Cup champion team.^[1] Stated that way, the objective is a benchmark rather than a product: it names an opponent everyone can picture, and it can be checked by playing the match. The 1997 games and conference were the point at which that target moved from an announced intention to a competition with teams on the field, spectators in the stands and results to compare.