RoboCup as a strategic initiative to advance technologies

RoboCup is an increasingly successful attempt to promote the full integration of AI and robotics research. The most prominent feature of RoboCup is that it provides the researchers with the opportunity to demonstrate their research results as a form of competition in a dynamically changing hostile environment, defined as the international standard game definition, in which the gamut of intelligent robotics research issues are naturally involved. In this article, first we show an overview of the RoboCup initiative. Currently, we have four kinds of leagues: the real small, middle, and four legged robots, and the simulation league. While the practical issues have been mainly attacked in the real robot leagues, the more strategic issues in multi-agent environments have been focused in the simulation league, such as teamwork among agents, agent modeling, and multi-agent learning which are argued in the rest of the paper. Finally, the future perspectives are given.