What technological fields are involved?

At first glance, RoboCup seems to deal only with issues from the field of Robotics. However, the RoboCup challenge actually touches on many fields. Here's a partial list:

• In Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Multi-agent environments, collaborative and individual planning and execution, opponent modeling, distributed and individual learning (both off-line and on-line), adaptation, strategy planning, sensor fusion, knowledge acquisition, real-time reasoning, visions, natural language processing (both for synthetic commentators, and for the players, which need to interact with a human referee), crowd behavior, teleoperation, and more.

• In electrical engineering, it touches on fault-tolerant hardware, real-time support, robust storage devices (imagine a hard disk being thrown to the ground due to a tackle...), sensors, control, etc.

• In Virtual Environments and Distributed Simulations, it touches on real-time multi-cast protocols (for running simulated games on the Internet - see more on this later in this FAQ), real-time 3D visualization, multi-player protocols, teleoperation, etc.

In addition, there's need for lightweight but tough materials (otherwise the robots will be too heavy, or become dented with every fall), and for batteries/power-sources that actually power a human-size robot for 90 minutes or more. There's need for robust, fault-tolerant joints and gears that can stand some bumps, and the list goes on and on.

The challenge is not limited to soccer-playing robots. Far from it we would like to see more and more applications grow from this domain into other fields. For example, there's already some work on a multi-agent commentator team, in which different synthetic experts work together to produce commentary on the game, much like the human teams seen so often on TV. Some people are considering modeling the fans, and their influence on the team, to examine issues in crowd behavior. Others still are looking into robot coaches, and so on.
[Gal]