The Austin Villa Robot Soccer Team participated in two competitions in the RoboCup 2015 competition in Hefei, China: the Standard Platform League (SPL) and the 3D simulation league.
After an off year in SPL last year, Austin Villa made it back to the quarterfinals this year, where they lost a close game to a team from the University of Chile (2-0). UNSW from Australia repeated as champions. The students and postdocs who contributed include Katie Genter, Jake Menashe, Josiah Hannah, Sanmit Narvekar, Ruohan Zhang, Elad Liebman and Jivko Sinapov.
In the 3D simulation league, Austin Villa defended their championship from last year, making it now four out of the past five years that they've won. This year, they won all 19 games they played, scoring 87 goals and conceding one. They also won all three challenge events, that are designed to emphasize new technical challenges (the free/scientific challenge which is based on a conference-like presentation, the kicking accuracy challenge, and the drop-in player challenge).
The lead student on the project is Patrick MacAlpine, who published 2 papers based on his RoboCup-related work at AAAI this past year: UT Austin Villa 2014: RoboCup 3D Simulation League Champion via Overlapping Layered Learning and SCRAM: Scalable Collision-avoiding Role Assignment with Minimal-makespan for Formational Positioning. The other Ph.D. students involved were Josiah Hannah and Jason Liang.
Cross-posted from a Computer Science news post.
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