(logo by Janette Forte)
This is the official site of the UT Austin Villa 3D Simulation team from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin.

This web page provides supplementary material to the following paper:

The RoboCup 2013 Drop-In Player Challenges: Experiments in Ad Hoc Teamwork

Patrick MacAlpine, Katie Genter, Samuel Barrett, and Peter Stone

Published in the Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots (IROS 2014) in Chicago, Illinois, USA, September 2014.

The full paper can be found here.

This page provides details on Drop-In Player Challenges that were held at RoboCup 2013 in three different leagues: Standard Platform League (SPL), 2D Simulation League, and 3D Simulation League. In each game of the challenges teams consisting of robots randomly drawn from participating teams in the competition play soccer against each other. These "pick-up" soccer games occur in an ad hoc teamwork setting with no pre-coordination or knowledge of who ones teammates are beforehand.

Rules of the challenges and videos of drop-in player games can be found below.

SPL Drop-In Player Challenge

SPL Drop-In Player Challenge Rules

Video from the third drop-in game can be seen below.  Audio was left in the video, as it can be helpful to hear the head referee communicating the game state and penalties with the game controller.


Download video: mp4

This game featured the following line-ups:

Blue: 1 Berlin United, 2 UT Austin Villa, 3 UT Austin Villa, 4 UPenn, 5 Berlin United
Red:  1 B-Human, 2 rUNSWift, 3 rUNSWift, 4 Nao Devils, 5 B-Human

Two goals were scored in this game, both by Red 1.

2D Drop-In Player Challenge

2D Drop-In Player Challenge Rules

Video from a 2D drop-in game can be seen below. Note Yellow players 4 and 11 from UTAustinVilla use dynamic role assignment to switch positions throughout the game.


Download video: mp4

This game featured the following line-ups:

Yellow: 3 FCPerspolis, 4 UTAustinVilla, 5 Yushan, 7 Yushan, 8 FCPerspolis, 11 UTAustinVilla
Red:  3 AUTMasterminds, 4 ITAndroids, 8 ITAndroids, 9 Axiom, 10 AUTMasterminds, 11 Axiom


3D Drop-In Player Challenge

3D Drop-In Player Challenge Rules

Video from a 3D drop-in game can be seen below. Note Blue player 2 from UTAustinVilla notices that no teammates are near the ball at the beginning of the game and thus beams (teleports) next to the ball to take the kickoff.


Download video: mp4

This game featured the following line-ups:

Blue: 2-3 UTAustinVilla, 4-5 Bahia3D, 6-7 Photon, 8-9 BoldHearts, 10-11 RoboCanes
Red:  2-3 magmaOffenburg, 4-5 L3MSIM, 6-7 SEUJolly, 8-9 Apollo3D, 10-11 FCPortugal

For any questions, please contact Patrick MacAlpine.