Peter Stone's UT Austin Villa RoboCup team won third place in an international robotic soccer competition in Singapore. The team placed third out of 24 teams in the RoboCup standard platform league, which concentrates on writing software to control Nao mini-humaniod robots. The team also finished 2nd place in the challenge events which tested passing and dribbling skills as well as a demonstration of scientific advances. Earlier this spring, the team won the US Open for the second year in a row.

The strategy was to keep the ball moving. "If we can keep the ball moving, we may be able to beat teams with better skills than we have," says Stone.

In addition to Stone, the (human) team members are postdoc Michael Quinlan; Ph.D. students Sam Barrett, Katie Genter, Matthew Hausknecht, Todd Hester, Juhyun Lee, and Aibo Tian; and Masters student Piyush Khandelwal.

RoboCup 2010: http://www.robocup2010.org/index.php

Austin Villa: http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/AustinVilla/

Scientific American article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=robocup-2010-world-cup-soccer