RoboCup is an international competition that promotes and advances robotics and AI through the challenges presented by its various leagues. We got the chance to sit down with Professor Manuela Veloso, one of RoboCup's founders, to find out more about how it all started, how the community has grown over the years, and the vision for the future. I think it would be very interesting to go right back to the beginning and hear how RoboCup got started. What was the initial idea, and how did it get set up? So we are talking about the mid-90s. In terms of the research in those days, it was the beginning of the internet and many AI and computer science researchers were focused on the internet, first on sophisticated search algorithms, on natural language understanding, on information retrieval, and then on software agents and machine learning applied to digital information. From what I recall, there was a smaller group of researchers who were interested in actual, physical robots, and in particular in AI and robotics.

These are composed into a single vector representing position by a similarity-preserving, conjunctive vector-binding operation.

These are composed into a single vector representing position by a similarity-preserving, conjunctive vector-binding operation.

Our first contribution addresses this shortcoming by introducing the CatLog-Derivative trick-a variation of the Log-Derivative trick tailored towards categorical distributions.

Should AI continue to be driven by a single paradigm, or does real progress lie in combining the strengths and weaknesses of many? Professor Luc De Raedt of KU Leuven has spent much of his career persistently addressing this question. Through pioneering work that bridges logic, probability, and machine learning, he has helped shape the field of neurosymbolic AI. In our conversation at IJCAI 2025 in Montreal, he spoke about what continues to fascinate him in this line of research, how he responds to criticisms of neurosymbolic AI, and why reconciling multiple paradigms is such an exciting challenge. Hello Professor De Raedt, thank you very much for joining me.

Recent advances in 4D radar-inertial odometry have demonstrated promising potential for autonomous lo calization in adverse conditions. However, effective handling of sparse and noisy radar measurements remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose a radar-inertial odometry with a spatial weighting method that adapts to unevenly distributed points and a novel point-description histogram for challenging point registration. To make full use of the Doppler velocity from different spatial sections, we propose a weighting calculation model. To enhance the point cloud registration performance under challenging scenarios, we con struct a novel point histogram descriptor that combines local geometric features and radar cross-section (RCS) features. We have also conducted extensive experiments on both public and self-constructed datasets. The results demonstrate the precision and robustness of the proposed VGC-RIO.