A history of RoboCup with Manuela Veloso - Robohub

RoboCup is an international robotics and AI competition founded in the mid-1990s to advance autonomous robotics through challenging tasks like robot soccer. Professor Manuela Veloso, one of RoboCup’s founders, recounts that the initiative emerged from early research efforts focused on integrating perception, cognition, and action in autonomous robots. During that period, researchers in Canada, Japan, and Japan’s Sony were independently developing small autonomous robots capable of playing simplified soccer games or learning to push balls into goals using reinforcement learning. These early demonstrations showed the feasibility of robot soccer as a research domain. Veloso’s lab at Carnegie Mellon, inspired by her PhD student Peter Stone’s passion for soccer, began robot soccer research and participated in early competitions such as MIROSOT in South Korea in 1996. This event, along with a subsequent workshop in Japan organized by Minoru Asada and Hiroaki Kitano, brought together key researchers and helped solidify the RoboCup community. The collaboration of diverse researchers with