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.

This article describes a milestone in our research efforts toward the real robot competition in RoboCup. We participated in the middle-size league at RoboCup-97, held in conjunction with the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Nagoya, Japan. The most significant features of our team, TRACKIES, are the application of a reinforcement learning method enhanced for real robot applications and the use of an omnidirectional vision system for our goalie that can capture a 360-degree view at any instant in time. The method and the system used are shown with competition results.