Team Members
Dr. Peter Stone- Peter is the founder and team leader of the Austin Villa robot soccer
teams. His interest in this challenging domain was sparked at the 1994 AAAI
conference upon seeing a demonstration of the UBC Dynamite project.
As a result, in 1994, as a Ph.D. candidate, he co-founded the
robosoccer project at Carnegie Mellon University.
Peter was also a founding member of the
RoboCup executive committee, and is currently a member of the board of
trustees of RoboCup. For him, the main appeal of the robot soccer
domain is the endless source of challenging and relevant research
problems that it presents.
Katie Genter- Katie is a seventh-year PhD student in Computer Science. She works on the SPL team, where her Robocup work has centered around kicking and behaviors. She has served as the SPL's technical committee chair since 2013.
Patrick MacAlpine- Patrick is a PhD student in Computer Science. He is
the student team leader of the 3D Simulation league team. His work has focused
on skill learning/optimization and multiagent coordination.
Jacob Menashe- Jacob is a fifth-year PhD student in Computer Science. He has worked on many different parts of the SPL codebase including vision, localization, behaviors, and the build system.
Elad Liebman- Elad is a fourth-year PhD student in Computer Science. He works on the vision system for the SPL team and has worked on various tasks in both 2D and 3D simulation.
Sanmit Narvekar- Sanmit is a fourth-year PhD student in Computer Science. He works on the vision system for the SPL team.
Josiah Hanna- Josiah is a second-year PhD student in Computer Science. He works on the motion system for the SPL team as well as on various learning tasks for the 3D Simulation team.
Ruohan Zhang- Ruohan is a second-year PhD student in Computer Science. He works on the motion system for the SPL team.
Alumni
Cody Bann- Cody is a first-year Masters student in Computer Sciences. Cody's
interests are centered around multi-agent intelligent robot systems,
including machine learning, artificial neural networks, and distributed
artificial intelligence. His strong interest is in diverse multi-agent
systems, systems in which many different types of entities with
differing abilities interact to perform a task. Cody's contributions to
the Austin Villa team include a visualization utility for displaying the
dynamic internal state of real and simulated robots as well as the
foundations for robot passing.
Samuel Barrett- Samuel is a sixth-year PhD student in Computer Sciences. He works on the locomotion, behaviors, and many other things involved in Robocup. He mainly works on the SPL team, but his walks have been successfully used by the Simulation league team.
Kurt Dresner- Kurt is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Sciences. His main
RoboCup interests are communication, coordination, and cooperation, but
he usually winds up doing whatever work is leftover to do (like making
this website). His other research interests include autonomous vehicles
and routing in optical networks. He hopes that someday robots will
drive us everywhere, and if we can get robots to play good soccer, we
can probably get them to drive cars as well. Kurt works on the legged
league.
Selim Erdogan- Selim is a sixth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Sciences. During
his time at UT, he has mainly been working on logic-based knowledge
representation and reasoning, especially about actions and their
effects, as part of the Texas Action Group. He
also works on the legged league, mostly with movement and behaviors.
Peggy Fidelman- Peggy is a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Sciences. Her main
RoboCup interests are in the area of movement coordination and planning.
Her other research interests lie in cognitive science, cognitive
modeling, and (of course!) robotics. She finds the legged robot soccer
domain to be particularly compelling because it requires the creation of
intelligent agents that interact with physical world in a nontrivial
way, rather than only in simulation or an overly simple toy
problem. Peggy works on the legged league.
Karl Harris- Karl is a Masters student in Computer Sciences. His research
interests include autonomous robots and real-time systems. On the
Aibos, Karl works on high-level behaviours and team strategy.
Yuchen He- Yuchen is a first-year Masters student in Computer Sciences. She works on various motion components for the SPL team.
Todd Hester- Todd is a Ph.D. student in Computer Sciences.
His RoboCup work has included localization, locomotion, behaviors, and everything else involved in RoboCup.
His research interests outside of Robocup include robotics and model-based reinforcement learning.
Todd works on the SPL team.
Nick Jong- Nick is a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer
Sciences. His contributions to the Austin Villa project mostly involve
software infrastructure and the behavior architecture, but he's interested
generally in the problem of developing behavior that is robust to
uncertainty. Outside of the Aibo Lab, he conducts research in
reinforcement learning and especially in hierarchical algorithms. Nick
works on the legged league.
Piyush Khandelwal- Piyush is a PhD student in Computer Sciences. He works on the vision system for the SPL team.
Nate Kohl- Nate Kohl is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer
Sciences. His research interests are primarily focused around
machine learning, robotics, and indirect encodings. Nate works on the
legged league.
Greg Kuhlmann-
Greg is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Sciences. Greg divides his time
between working in the simulated coach league and in the legged league.
On the Aibos, he mainly works on localization, which is the problem of
estimating where you are (on the field) based on what you see and how
you move. He also works on general architecture issues.
Tekin Mericli- I'm a first-year Masters student in Computer Sciences and my research
interests mainly lie in the fields of intelligent robotics, multi-agent
systems, distributed AI, machine learning, computer vision, and
cognitive science. My primary aim is to create machines that are able to
come up with solutions when they really don't know what to do (thanks to
Jean Piaget's definition for "intelligence"). Design and development of
motion and behavior modules can be listed as my contributions to the
AustinVilla 4-legged league team.
Michael Quinlan- Michael is a postdoc in the lab.
Adam Setapen- Adam is a masters student.
Mohan Sridharan- Mohan is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in
Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests
include computer vision (specifically color constancy) and
localization on mobile robots. He would like to see the robots
automatically learn to adapt to environmental changes. Outside work,
he likes to read fiction and listen to sad music.
Dan
Stronger- Dan is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Sciences. His
research interests include programming robots to better automatically
develop an understanding of themselves and their environments. His
hobbies include tennis and chess. Dan works on the legged league.
Shawn Yu- Shawn is a first-year CS Masters student from Taiwan. His interests
include multi-agent systems, automated planning & scheduling, and
machine learning. His contributions to the Austin Villa are designing
single-robot behaviors from scratch and three-robot ball passing based
on the old infrastructure. Besides working almost 10 hrs/day in the
lab, he enjoys playing team sports and guitar. Shawn works on the
legged league.
Duy Vu- Duy is a Masters student in Computer Sciences. His research interests
are machine learning and computer vision. On the Aibos, he works on
communication, coordination, and extending the Simulator for testing
behaviour code.
