In Robot Soccer and More, UT Students Best the Competition in Eindhoven

Student researchers from The University of Texas at Austin Department of Computer Science are returning to the Forty Acres triumphant after beating the competition at RoboCup 2024 with a team of winning autonomous robots. 

The international scientific competition attracted an estimated 2,500 artificial intelligence and robotics researchers from more than four dozen countries. RoboCup seeks to “advance the state of the art of intelligent robots” that will be needed to help meet a wide range of societal challenges. At each year’s event, research teams compete at everything from robotic soccer matches to challenges based on domestic tasks for robots. This year’s victories coincide with UT’s year-long Year of AI initiative.

Over the years, Texas Robotics director and computer science professor Peter Stone has mentored many championship-winning teams across categories. This year, he and the UT students teamed up with a UT computer science alum and current University of Wisconsin Professor Josiah Hanna and his students to form WisTex United. At this year’s RoboCup, held in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, the team competed in the humanoid robot soccer competition known as the Standard Platform League. In this category, all teams use the same robots, which are then programmed to compete together as a team and without human intervention. This means the robots have to be able to navigate decisions on the soccer field, move the ball down the field, visually recognize their own team’s players and other objects and effectively beat an opposing team programmed separately for the same challenges. 

The team consisted of UT Austin Ph.D. students Zhihan Wang and Siddhant Aggarwal and recent master’s degree alumni Josh Kelle and Geethika Hemkumar. After securing an exciting come-from-behind victory in the second half of a match against a team from Universidad de la Sabana in Columbia, WisTex shut out the competition in the finals, against a team from Germany’s University of Applied Scientists. With that 7-0 win in the “Challenge Shield” (lower division) category, the team brought home a first-place trophy. 

“This year, we chose to compete in the lower division because we were forming a new collaborative team and didn’t know how well it would work, but we intend to compete in the upper division next year,” said Stone, who has been involved in RoboCup competitions since the program’s inception nearly three decades ago. 

Another competition, RoboCup@Home, focuses on honing the skills of autonomous service robots by having robots listen to verbal requests, then plan and execute on those requests in a setting that is new to them. UT computer science Ph.D. student Yuqian Jiang led the effort, joined by mechanical engineering graduate student Chang Shi and volunteer and aerospace engineering alum Steven Patrick. Progressing in multiple rounds of the competition, Jiang’s entry responded to general-purpose service requests, such as “Fetch a drink from the shelf and place it on the TV table.” It also correctly identified answers to questions in a dynamic environment. Jiang was awarded RoboCup’s Silvia Coradeschi award in recognition of her distinguished research accomplishments.

“All of the students worked very hard leading up to this event,” Stone said. “I’m proud of them.”