UT team new champions of Robot Soccer

AUSTIN (KXAN) - University of Texas Austin Villa, a team of computer science students led by professor Peter Stone, won two 2012 Robot Soccer World Cup division championships during RoboCup 2012 last week in Mexico City.

The annual tournament, founded in 1997 to foster innovation in artificial intelligence and robotics research, is often regarded as the world’s biggest robotics and artificial intelligence event, according to the College of Natural Science at UT. 

The UT Austin Villa RoboCup World Champion Team includes: Dr. Peter Stone, doctoral students Todd Hester, Sam Barrett, Katie Genter, Piyush Khandelwal and Jake Menashe, and master’s student Yuchen He.

The artificial intelligence research that each team has to complete in order to participate could someday lead to enhanced bomb-searching robots, autonomous cars that increase traveling efficiency and reduce automobile accidents and self-healing smart computers, said officials for the RoboCupSoccer Standard Platform League.

According to the UT website, the Texas team also won the RoboCupSoccer Standard Platform League competition, one of the highest profile leagues at RoboCup for the first time in university history. This league consists of teams developing software and programs for fully autonomous, humanoid robots

“I'm incredibly proud of the students for the great work that they put in, and especially the great research behind the success that made it all possible,” said Stone, a professor in the Department of Computer Science.

The Texas team blew through other teams, making it all the way to the championship. In the championship game, the Texas team competed against the University of Bremen in Germany, the undefeated champions three years in a row, and won with a final score of 4 to 2.

“In some sense, my team has been working toward this since I founded UT Austin Villa back in 2003,” said Stone. “We are savoring the success of this RoboCup competition.”

Watch the video of the RoboCup games on the   UT Austin villa YouTube channel .