Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain that involves multiple agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives. In this article, we describe CMUNITED, the team of small robotic agents that we developed to enter the RoboCup-97 competition. We designed and built the robotic agents, devised the appropriate vision algorithm, and developed and implemented algorithms for strategic collaboration between the robots in an uncertain and dynamic environment. The article then focuses on the agent behaviors, ranging from low-level individual behaviors to coordinated, strategic team behaviors.

A wide variety of robotics research was demonstrated at the 1997 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Exhibition. Twenty-one robotic teams participated, making it the largest exhibition ever. This article describes the robotics research presented by the participating teams.

RoboCup-97, The First Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, was held at the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The world champions are CMUNITED (Carnegie Mellon University) for the small-size league, DREAMTEAM (University of Southern California) and TRACKIES (Osaka University, Japan) for the middle-size league, and AT-HUMBOLDT (Humboldt University) for the simulation league. The Scientific Challenge Award was given to Sean Luke (University of Maryland) for his genetic programming- based simulation team LUKE, and the Engineering Challenge Awards were given to UTTORI UNITED (Utsunomiya University, Toyo University, and Riken, Japan) and RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia) for designing novel omnidirectional driving mechanisms. RoboCup-98, the Second Robot World Cup Soccer, was held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Multiagent Systems in Paris, France, in July 1998.

Researchers and technology developers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), other government agencies, academia, and industry recently met in Pasadena, California, to take stock of past and current work and future challenges in the application of AI to highly autonomous systems. The meeting was catalyzed by new opportunities in developing autonomous spacecraft for NASA and was in part a celebration of the fictional birth year of the HAL-9000 computer.

Robot soccer competition provides an excellent opportunity for integrated robotics research. All these tasks demand robots that are autonomous (sensing, thinking, and acting as independent creatures), efficient (functioning under time and resource constraints), cooperative (collaborating with each other to accomplish tasks that are beyond an individual's capabilities), and intelligent (reasoning and planning actions and perhaps learning from experience). Furthermore, all these capabilities must be integrated into a single and complete system, which raises a set of challenges that are new to individual research disciplines. At RoboCup-97, held as part of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, these integrated robots performed well, and our DREAMTEAM won the world championship in the middle-size robot league.

Modeling various aspects of language-syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse, among others -- by the use of constrained formal-computational systems, just adequate for such modeling, has proved to be an effective research strategy, leading to deep understanding of these aspects, with implications for both machine processing and human processing. This approach enables one to distinguish between the universal and stipulative constraints. This is in contrast to an approach where we start with the most powerful formal-computational system and then model the phenomena by making all constraints stipulative in a sense. The use of constrained systems for modeling leads to some novel ways of describing locality of structures and brings out the relationship between the complexity of description of primitives and local computations over them.

The Find-Life-on-Mars event of the 1997 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition featured robots trying to find and collect stationary and moving colored objects in an arena littered with real rocks. The 2- day event had 11 entries participating in both single- robot and multirobot categories, both with and without manipulators. During the event, many of the robots successfully demonstrated object recognition, obstacle avoidance, exploration, and the collection and depositing of objects.

After a summary of the rules, we outline the high and low points of the competition. Then we suggest ways such competitions could better accommodate new teams in the future.

The Eleventh International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning was held in Cortona, Italy, on 3 to 6 June 1997. Participants included scientists from both qualitative reasoning and quantitative mathematical modeling communities. This article summarizes the significant issues and discussion raised during the workshop.

Research on constraints and agents is emerging at the intersection of the communities studying constraint computation and software agents. Constraint- based reasoning systems can be enhanced by using agents with multiple problem-solving approaches or diverse problem representations. The constraint computation paradigm can be used to model agent consultation, cooperation, and competition. An interesting theme in agent interaction, which is studied here in constraint-based terms, is confronting ignorance: the agent's own ignorance or its ignorance of other agents.