This book constitutes the ninth official archival publication devoted to RoboCup, documenting presentations at the RoboCup 2005 International Symposium, held in Osaka, Japan, July 2005 alongside the RoboCup Competition. The book presents 34 revised full papers and 38 revised short papers together with two award-winning papers. This is a valuable source of reference and inspiration for those interested in robotics or distributed intelligence, and mandatory reading for the rapidly growing RoboCup community.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 11th RoboCup International Symposium, held in Atlanta, GA, USA, in July 2007, immediately after the 2007 RoboCupSoccer, RoboCupRescue and RoboCupJunior competitions. Papers presented at the symposium focused on topics related to these three events and to artificial intelligence and robotics in general. The 18 revised full papers and 42 revised poster papers included in the book were selected from 133 submissions. Each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members. The program committee also nominated two papers for the Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards, respectively. The book provides a valuable source of reference and inspiration for R&D professionals and educationalists active or interested in robotics and artificial intelligence.

This book constitutes the 10th official archival publication devoted to RoboCup. It documents the achievements presented at the RoboCup 2006 International Symposium, held in Bremen, Germany, in June 2006, in conjunction with the RoboCup Competition. It serves as a valuable source of reference and inspiration for those interested in robotics or distributed intelligence.

This book includes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 13th RoboCup International Symposium, held in Graz, Austria, in June/July, 2009. They cover scientific contributions to a variety of research areas related to all RoboCup divisions.

The idea of using soccer game for promoting science and technology of artificial intelligence and robotics was presented in the early 90s of the last century. Researchers in many different scientific fields all over the world recognized this idea as an inspiring challenge. Robot soccer research is interdisciplinary, complex, demanding but most of all, fun and motivational. Obtained knowledge and results of research can easily be transferred and applied to numerous applications and projects dealing with relating fields such as robotics, electronics, mechanical engineering, artificial intelligence, etc. As a consequence, we are witnesses of rapid advancement in this field with numerous robot soccer competitions and a vast number of teams and team members. The best illustration is numbers from the RoboCup 2009 world championship held in Graz, Austria which gathered around 2300 participants in over 400 teams from 44 nations. Attendance numbers at various robot soccer events show that interest in robot soccer goes beyond the academic and R

Robotics technology has recently advanced to the point of being widely accessible for relatively low-budget research, as well as for graduate, undergraduate, and even secondary and primary school education. This lecture provides an example of how to productively use a cutting-edge advanced robotics platform for education and research by providing a detailed case study with the Sony AIBO robot, a vision-based legged robot. The case study used for this lecture is the UT Austin Villa RoboCup Four-Legged Team. This lecture describes both the development process and the technical details of its end result. The main contributions of this lecture are (i) a roadmap for new classes and research groups interested in intelligent autonomous robotics who are starting from scratch with a new robot, and (ii) documentation of the algorithms behind our own approach on the AIBOs with the goal of making them accessible for use on other vision-based and/or legged robot platforms.

To design and develop capable, dependable, and affordable intelligent systems, their performance must be measurable. Scienti?c methodologies for standardization and benchmarking are crucial for quantitatively evaluating the performance of eme- ing robotic and intelligent systems’ technologies. There is currently no accepted standard for quantitatively measuring the performance of these systems against user-de?ned requirements; and furthermore, there is no consensus on what obj- tive evaluation procedures need to be followed to understand the performance of these systems. The lack of reproducible and repeatable test methods has precluded researchers working towards a common goal from exchanging and communic- ing results, inter-comparing system performance, and leveraging previous work that could otherwise avoid duplication and expedite technology transfer. Currently, this lack of cohesion in the community hinders progress in many domains, such as m- ufacturing, service, healthcare, and security. By providing the research community with access to standardized tools, reference data sets, and open source libraries of solutions, researchers and consumers will be able to evaluate the cost and be- ?ts associated with intelligent systems and associated technologies. In this vein, the edited book volume addresses performance evaluation and metrics for intel- gent systems, in general, while emphasizing the need and solutions for standardized methods. To the knowledge of the editors, there is not a single book on the market that is solely dedicated to the subject of performance evaluation and benchmarking of intelligent systems.