RoboCup and its role in the history and future of AI

As I write this blob post, we're a few days away from the opening of the 2021 RoboCup Competitions and Symposium. Running from June 22nd-28th, this event brings together AI and robotics researchers and learners from around the world, for the first (and ideally last!) time in a fully remote format. The first official international RoboCup event occurred 25 years ago, at the IROS 1996 conference in Osaka, Japan. Called "pre-RoboCup" because the first full RoboCup was slated to launch the following year at the 1997 IJCAI conference in Nagoya, the CMUnited team created by myself and my Ph.D. advisor, Manuela Veloso, was the only non-Japanese entry in the simulation competition, which was the only event that year. While RoboCup has indisputably played a huge role in the last quarter-century of AI research, it has also played a leading role in my own personal story.