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RoboCup News
The UPenn Robocup team is currently in Lisbon, which has been overrun by Greeks who are in town for today's Euro 2004 final match with Portugal. The UPenn team finished 4th in this year's 4-legged league competition out of 24 international teams. They finished as the top American team. The team came in first in their pool, cruising by weaker teams such France (8-0), Chile (9-0), and ARAIBO Japan (10-0) during the preliminaries. They beat the University of Hamburg in the quarterfinals (4-1), but then lost in the semis to the eventual second-place finisher UTS Sydney (1-5), who had crushed UNSW earlier by 9 goals. In the hard-fought consolation match with Univ. of Newcastle, the UPennalizers came back from a 4-1 halftime deficit to tie the match 4-4. Unfortunately, a late bad roll gave the Newcastle team the victory at 5-4, leaving the UPennalizers in fourth. Unlike their performance in the Euro 2004 competition, the top team in the legged league this year was the German team, which brought 34 graduate students from 5 different universities to the competition. They cruised to victory in the earlier rounds (beating CMU 9-1), and won the final match 5-3 against UTS. With the new robots, the level of play in the league has increased dramatically, with the top teams displaying great ball handling skills, localization based upon field lines, obstacle detection and dodging. At this point, it looks like high-level strategies will start to play an important role in these robots in the future. -Dan
