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FROM RoboCup TO RoboCity CoRE

Minoru Asada

Graduate School of Eng. Osaka University,
Suita, Osaka 565-0871, JAPAN

ABSTRACT
This article presents the brief introduction of Robot World Cup Competition and Conference, in short,
RoboCup. The aims and the current activities are introduced. Next, RoboCity CoRE, an inner city RT
base, is introduced as a RT experiment field open to public.

KEYWORDS

RoboCup, RoboCupSoccer, RoboCupRescue, RoboCupJunior, RoboCity CoRE, Open Lab.,
Studio,Safety Verification Field.

INTRODUCTION

RoboCup is an attempt to foster intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem of which
the ultimate goal is to build a team of eleven humanoid robots that can beat the human world cup
champion soccer team by 2050. It's obvious that building a robot to play soccer game is an immense
challenge; readers might therefore wonder why even bother to propose RoboCup. It is our intention to
use RoboCup as a vehicle to promote robotics and AI research, by offering a publicly appealing but
formidable challenge [1,2].

A unique feature of RoboCup is that it is a systematic attempt to promote research using common
domain, mainly soccer. Also, it is perhaps the first to explicitly claim that the ultimate goal is to beat
human world cup champion team. One of the effective ways to promote engineering research, part
from specific application developments, is to set a significant long term goal. When the
accomplishment of such a goal has significant social impact, we call this kind of goal a grand
challenge project. Building a robot to play soccer is not such a project. But its accomplishment would
certainly considered as a major achievement in the field of robotics, and numerous technology spin-off
can be expected during the course of the project. We call this kind of project a landmark project, and
RoboCup is definitely a project of this kind.

Since the first RoboCup in 1997 [3], it has grown into an international joint-research project in which
about 4000 researchers from 40 nations around world participate (see Figure 1), and it is one the most
ambitious landmark projects of the 21st century. RoboCup currently consists of three divisions: