RoboCup Federation

In the history of artificial intelligence and robotics, the year 1997 will be remembered as a turning point.

The idea of robots playing soccer was first mentioned by Professor Alan Mackworth (University of British Columbia, Canada) in a paper entitled “On Seeing Robots” presented at VI-92, 1992. and later published in a book Computer Vision: System, Theory, and Applications, pages 1-13, World Scientific Press, Singapore, 1993. A series of papers on the Dynamo robot soccer project was published by his group.

During the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-95) held at Montreal, Canada, August, 1995, the announcement was made to organize the First Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences in conjunction with IJCAI-97 Nagoya. At the same time, the decision was made to organize Pre-RoboCup-96, in order to identify potential problems associated with organizing RoboCup on a large scale. The decision was made to provide two years of preparation and development time, so that initial group of researchers could start robot and simulation team development, as well as giving lead time for their funding schedules.

Pre-RoboCup-96 was held during International Conference on Intelligence Robotics and Systems (IROS-96), Osaka, from November 4 – 8, 1996, with eight teams competing in a simulation league and demonstration of real robot for middle size league. While limited in scale, this competition was the first competition using soccer games for promotion of research and education.

The first official RoboCup games and conference was held in 1997 with great success. Over 40 teams participated (real and simulation combined), and over 5,000 spectators attended.