Main competition, drop-in player competition, and challenges:

Austrian Kangaroos, Berlin United – Nao Team Humboldt, B-Human, Cerberus, DAInamite, Edinferno, HULKs, MRL, Nao Devils Dortmund, Nao-Team HTWK, Northern Bites, NTU RoboPAL, Philosopher, RoboCanes, rUNSWift, SPQR, TJArk, UChile, UPennalizers, UT Austin Villa

Drop-in player competition and challenges:

Dutch Nao Team, MI-PAL, SpelBots, UnBeatables, UTH-CAR

Alternate teams for the main competition:

1st Alternate: HULKs (given spot in main competition)
2nd Alternate: Kouretes (given spot in main competition, but later opted not to attend)
3rd Alternate: MRL (given spot in main competition)
4th Alternate: Team NUST (opted not to attend)

International SPL 2014 Competitors

Note: This page is a work in progress, and should not be considered to be an extensive list of all qualified 2014 SPL teams at this point. Team information is being posted as it is received from teams.

Austrian Kangaroos	Austria Team Contact: Dietmar Schreiner, Alexander Hofmann Institutes: Vienna University of Technology – Compilers and Languages Group University of Applied Sciences Technikum Vienna
Team Profile:	The Austrian Kangaroos are a team of volunteers, consisting of undergraduates, graduates, and researchers from Vienna University of Technology and University of Applied Sciences Technikum Vienna. The Kangaroos participated in RoboCup for the first time in Graz, 2009. Since then numerous students run through our robotic based education gaining experience in research and development within a challenging but entertaining environment. Parts of our professional research activities have been disseminated into other domains like the automotive industry and the game engineering business.
Research Topics:	biomimetics, safety and security, computational intelligence, computer vision
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Not available
Berlin United – Nao Team Humboldt	Germany Team Contact: Heinrich Mellmann, Marcus Scheunemann Institutes: Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin
Team Profile:	The Nao Team Humboldt (NaoTH) consists of students and researchers from the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin and is part of the joint research group “Berlin United” together with the RoboCup research group Fumanoids (KidSize League) from the Freie Universitat Berlin. The team was founded at the end of 2007 as the successor of the Aibo Team Humboldt (ATH), which was participating in RoboCup from 1999 to 2008 and won three times the World Championship in the Four-Legged League as part of the German Team. Since the very beginning our team is actively involved in RoboCup SPL where we could achieve good results, especially in a number of local competitions and technical challenges, e.g., we won the Iran Open in 2011 and the Open Challenge in 2012. Beside the SPL we are involved in the S3D league where we achieved the 2nd place at RoboCup in 2010.
Research Topics:	Situation Modelling (self localization, local object modelling, semantic mapping), Attention Control, Dynamic Motion Control (walk, ball handling)
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Team Report 2013
B-Human	Germany Team Contact: Thomas Roefer, Tim Laue, Judith Mueller Institutes: DFKI Bremen, Cyber-Physical Systems University of Bremen, Department of Computer Science
Team Profile:	B-Human consists of students from the University of Bremen in their advanced study period and researchers from the DFKI Bremen. In the past, members of the B-Human team participated in different RoboCup leagues. Since 2009, B-Human won every RoboCup German Open as well as the RoboCup World Championships 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2013. We also won the RoboCup Technical Challenges in 2009 and 2013. In addition, B-Human team members earned the Best Paper Award at the RoboCup Symposiums 2010 and 2013. In 2014, we intend to participate in the RoboCup World Championship and the RoboCup German Open.
Research Topics:	Probabilistic state estimation, real-time computer vision, robot simulation, humanoid walking
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Code Release and Team Report 2013
Cerberus	Turkey Team Contact: Prof. H. Levent Akın, Okan Aşık Institutes: Computer Engineering Department of Boğaziçi University
Team Profile:	Cerberus has been participating in RoboCup SPL competitions since 2001 except 2004. Cerberus was ranked first in the Technical Challenges in 2005 and made it to the quarter finals in 2006 and 2008. Cerberus took the fourth place in RoboCup German Open 2007. Cerberus 2014 team consists of five students and their advisor Prof. H. Levent Akın. Two of the members are PhD students and one of them is an MSc student. The other two members are undergraduate students who are participating in the team as a part of their graduation project. Our main focus is the development of successful autonomous multi-agent systems.
Research Topics:	Multi-agent planning (Dec-POMDP), learning from demonstration, motion planning. reinforcement learning.
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Team Report 2013
DAInamite	Germany Team Contact: Martin Berger Institutes: Technische Universität Berlin DAI-Labor
Team Profile:	Team DAInamite transitioned in the end of 2011 from 2D-simulation to SPL. The team is constituted of individuals from Faculty IV (EECS) and Faculty II (Math&Nat.Sc.) of TU Berlin and participates in SPL related activities since its debut in German Open 2012 competitions.
Research Topics:	bipedal locomotion, multi-agent systems and coordination
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	DAInamite TDP 2014
Dutch Nao Team	The Netherlands Team Contact: Patrick de Kok / Duncan ten Velthuis / Eugenio Bargiacchi Institutes: Universiteit van Amsterdam, Faculty of Science, Informatics Institute Technische Universiteit Delft, Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering Technische Universiteit Delft, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science Maastricht University, Department of Knowledge Engineering
Team Profile:	The Dutch Nao Team consists of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bachelor and Master Students, supported by a senior staff-member. The Dutch Nao Team debuted in the Standard Platform League (SPL) competition at the German Open 2010. The same year the first research paper about the Nao was published. In 2011 the Dutch Nao Team made its breakthrough by qualifying for the World RoboCup in Istanbul.
Research Topics:	Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Multi-Agent Systems, Motion, Communication, World Modeling, Probabilistic Robotics
Competing in:	drop-in player competition and technical challenges
Team Report:	TDP 2014
Edinferno	United Kingdom Team Contact: Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Alejandro Bordallo Institutes: Robust Autonomy and Decisions Group, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh
Team Profile:	Our research focused team consists of graduate and undergraduate students at the School of Informatics ? Edinburgh University. Edinferno is the first UK-based team to participate in RoboCup SPL, having made its debut at RoboCup 2011 in Istanbul. Edinferno achieved a quarter-final finish in its second appearance at RoboCup 2012 in Mexico City. Since then, we have continued to improve our team and we look forward to an exciting competition in João Pessoa ? Brazil 2014.
Research Topics:	Autonomous decision making under uncertainty, learning in single/multiagent environments, HRI and strategic interaction and navigation through intention prediction.
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Edinferno TDP 2014
HULKs	Germany Team Contact: Stefan Kaufmann Institutes: Hamburg University of Technology
Team Profile:	The HULKs are a very young team founded in 2013 at the Hamburg University of Technology. It consists of undergraduate and graduate students lead by a Ph.D. student. The RoboCup German Open 2014 is going to be the first championship the HULKs are participating in. The team only competes in the Standard Platform League (SPL) so far.
Research Topics:	Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Biped Walking
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Not available
MiPal	Australia Spain Team Contact: Vladimir Estivill-Castro (griffith) Institutes: Griffith University (Australia) Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
Team Profile:	MiPal is composed mainly of a small group of undergraduate and post-graduate students. Participating in RoboCup since 2003, with Aibo robots, and since 2011 in the SPL with Aldebaran’s Nao robot.
Research Topics:	Robot-Human Interaction. Software Engineering for Robotics. Software architectures. Model-driven development. Computer Vision. Planning on board of robots in Dynamic Environments. Our expertise has continued to be the development of a flexible and generic software architecture and our research publications demonstrate this (see list of publications). More recently our research has produced capabilities to model behaviours of robots at a high level description by combining reactive mechanisms (modelled by finite state machines) and non-monotonic reasoning (represented by logics like Plausible Logic).
Competing in:	drop-in player competition and technical challenges
Team Report:	Not available
MRL-SPL	Iran Team Contact: Omid AmirGhiasvand, Sepehr Tabatabaei Institutes: Qazvin Azad University
Team Profile:	MRL-SPL is one of the Mechatronics Research Laboratories divisions working on NAO robots. MRL operates under supervision of Qazvin Azad University and its main research topics are artificial intelligence and robotics. It has been an active participant of RoboCup in different leagues since 2002 as well. We have participated in SPL-League since 2009. The team consists of various groups allocated to perform team?s strategy tasks and technical requirements in fields of Computer Vision, Motion, Modeling and Behavior Control.
Research Topics:	Behavior Control, Multi-Agent Cooperation and Coordination, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Modeling and Localization, Computer Vision, Bipedal Locomotion, System Identification, Optimal Control.
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Not available
Nao Devils Dortmund	Germany Team Contact: Oliver Urbann, Matthias Hofmann, Ingmar Schwarz Institutes: Robotics Research Institute, TU Dortmund
Team Profile:	The team consists of researchers and students of TU Dortmund University. We participate in RoboCup competitions since 2002 with several different teams: Microsoft Hellhounds and as part of the German Team (4-Legged-League), DoHBots (Humanoid League), and BreDoBrothers (together with University Bremen) and now as Nao Devils Dortmund in the Standard Platform League.
Research Topics:	biped walking, computer vision, stochastic filtering, artificial intelligence
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	TeamReport-2013-NaoDevilsDortmund.pdf
Nao-Team HTWK	Germany Team Contact: Rico Tilgner Institutes: Faculty of Computer Science, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Leipzig University of Applied Sciences
Team Profile:	The Nao-Team HTWK is a RoboCup team that consists of graduate and undergraduate students of Leipzig University of Applied Sciences and was founded in 2009. The team participated in RoboCup 2009-2011 as well as the RoboCup German Open 2009-2011.
Research Topics:	Evolutionary Algorithms, Biped Walking, Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Robot Coordination, Computer Vision, Localization
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Not available
Northern Bites	USA Team Contact: Eric Chown, Josh Imhoff Institutes: Bowdoin College
Team Profile:	The Northern Bites are a purely undergraduate team from a small (1600 students) liberal arts college. The team was founded in 2005 and first participated at a RoboCup championship in 2006. That year the Northern Bites finished in the top 16 and started a streak of top 16 finishes that continues to this day. In addition the team won the World Championship in 2007, finished 3rd in 2008, 2nd in 2010 and has top eight finishes in 2011 and 2013.
Research Topics:	Machine Vision, Cognitive Localization, Machine Learning, Multi-Agent Cooperation, Robot Architecture
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Team reports available on the website. The codebase is available on github.
NTU RoboPAL	Taiwan Team Contact: Chieh-Chih (Bob) Wang Institutes: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University
Team Profile:	The team consists of graduate and undergraduate students of the Robot Perception and Learning Laboratory. Started from 2009, NTU RoboPAL participated in RoboCup SPL and made it to the quarter-final in 2009 and won the third place in 2011.
Research Topics:	Multi-robot localization and tracking, multi-robot cooperative perception, activity recognition, motion planning, multi-robot navigation, imitation learning
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Team Description 2013
Philosopher	Estonia Team Contact: Siim Schults, Gholamreza Anbarjafari, Alvo Aabloo Institutes: Intelligent Materials and Systems Laboratory, University of Tartu
Team Profile:	Team Philosopher is the first group to attend RoboCup from Estonia. Team consists of 6 active members including undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate level students from University of Tartu led by Dr. Gholamreza Anbarjafari.
Research Topics:	Computer vision, signal processing, machine learning, multi-agent systems
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Not available
RoboCanes	USA Team Contact: Andreas Seekircher, Saminda Abeyruwan, Ubbo Visser Institutes: Department of Computer Science, University of Miami
Team Profile:	The Team consists of graduate students of the AI, Games &Robotics LAB. RoboCanes participated in RoboCup since 2010 in the 3D Soccer Simulation League and reached 2nd place in the 2012 World Cup. RoboCanes won the German Open 2011 and was also runner-up at the Iran Open 2012. It is the team’s 3rd year in the SPL.
Research Topics:	Self localization, motions, obstacle avoidance, parameter optimization, reinforcement learning
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Not available
rUNSWift	Australia Team Contact: Benhard Hengst, Morri Pagnucco, Claude Sammut Institutes: School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales
Team Profile:	RoboCup continues to inspire and motivate our research interests in cognitive robotics and machine learning, including vision, state-estimation, locomotion, layered hybrid architectures, and high-level programming languages. The 2014 team is composed of 4 undergraduate students, 1 masters student, 1 postgraduate student, 4 alumni, 2 faculty, and 1 research associate.
Research Topics:	Autonomous Systems is a priority research topic in robotics at CSE, UNSW. Our general research focus, of which the RoboCup SPL is a part, is to: (1) further develop reasoning methods that incorporate uncertainty and real-time constraints and that integrate with the statistical methods used in SLAM and perception, (2) develop methods for using estimates of uncertainty to guide future decision making so as to reduce the uncertainty, (3) extend these methods for multi-robot cooperation, (4) use symbolic representations as the basis for human-robot interaction, (5) develop learning algorithms for hybrid systems, such as using knowledge of logical constraints to restrict the search of a trial-and-error learner and learning the constraints, and (6) develop high level symbolic robotic languages that provide abstractions for a large range of deliberation, planning and learning techniques so as to simplify robot programming
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/about-us/help-resources/for-students/student-projects/robocup/
SpelBots	USA Team Contact: Dr. Yolanda Rankin, Dr. Jakita Thomas, Jazette Johnson, Daria Jordan Institutes: Spelman College
Team Profile:	The SpelBots team consists of undergraduate women students in computer science and engineering, mathematics, and biology. SpelBots have competed in international and local/regional RoboCup events since 2005. The team will compete in the RoboCup 2014 Brazil in the Standard Platform League.
Research Topics:	Humanoids as Emotionally Intelligent Agents, K-12 robotics education
Competing in:	drop-in player competition and technical challenges
Team Report:	Not available
SPQR Team	Italy Team Contact: Francesco Riccio Institutes: Department of Computer, Control and Managemente engineering “Antonio Ruberti” at La Sapienza University of Rome
Team Profile:	SPQR Team is the RoboCup team of the Department of Computer, Control and Managemente engineering “Antonio Ruberti” at La Sapienza University of Rome. Our team participate in RoboCup competitions since 1998 in different leagues: Middle-size(1998-2002), Four-legged(2000-2007), Real-Rescue(2003-2006), Virtual-Rescue(2006-2008), Standard Platform League since 2008. During 2013 we won the first place at the Iran Open, and the third place at the German Open.
Research Topics:	multi-object tracking and self localization, real-time computer vision
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Qualification Report 2014
TJArk	China Team Contact: CHEN Qijun, WANG Hanbin Institutes: School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University
Team Profile:	TJArk was established in 2004 as a part of the Lab of Robot and Intelligent Control of Tongji University in China. The team consists of graduates and undergraduates. All the members of this team are from Control Science and Control Engineering Department. TJArk participated in the RoboCup SPL competition from 2006 through 2013. We entered the quarter finals in RoboCup 2007 and RoboCup 2008. We won the RoboCup China Open in 2013. In 2014, we intend to participate in the RoboCup World Championship and the RoboCup China Open.
Research Topics:	Machine Vision, Motion Control of Biped Robot, Machine Learning, Self Localization, Multi-agent Systems
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	Not available
UnBeatables	Brazil Team Contact: Antônio Padilha L. Bó, Mariana Bernardes, Geovany A. Borges Institutes: Universidade de Brasília
Team Profile:	The UnBeatables team is a joint effort from undergraduate students that participated in Brazilian Robotic Challenges and graduate students working with humanoid robots locomotion and localization. The team is coordinated by researchers from LARA, a robotics lab from the University of Brasília. Our first official competition will be at Robocup 2014 in Brazil. The team will compete in the Drop-in Player competition.
Research Topics:	biped locomotion and whole-body movements, visual SLAM, path planning, robot collaboration
Competing in:	drop-in player competition and technical challenges
Team Report:	Not available
UChile Robotics Team	Chile Team Contact: José Miguel Yáñez, Javier Ruiz-del-Solar Institutes: Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile Advanced Mining Technology Center, Universidad de Chile
Team Profile:	The UChile robotics team is an effort of the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Universidad de Chile in order to foster research in mobile robotics. The team is involved in RoboCup competitions since 2003 in different leagues: Four-legged 2003-2007, Humanoid in 2007-2010, and Standard Platform League from 2008.
Research Topics:	Mobile robotics and computer vision: self localization, perception, navigation, learning and mobile robot simulation.
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	TDP 2014
UPennalizers	USA Team Contact: Dr. Daniel Lee, Dickens Yizheng He Institutes: GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania
Team Profile:	The team consists of graduate and undergraduate students of the University of Pennsylvania led by Dr Daniel Lee of the GRASP Lab. The UPennalizers participated in the RoboCup SPL competition from 1999 through 2005 and returned in 2009. Last year, the UPennalizers team was an international RoboCup 2013 SPL participant as well as a 2013 US Open SPL participant.
Research Topics:	Computer vision, self localization, path planning and obstacle avoidance, feedback based walk/motion engine, communication and collaboration.
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	2013Report.pdf
UT Austin Villa	USA Team Contact: Samuel Barrett, Katie Genter, Jacob Menashe Institutes: Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin
Team Profile:	Our team is from the University of Texas at Austin. We participated in the Aibo league starting in 2003 and started with the Naos in 2007. We also field teams in the RoboCup 2D and 3D simulation leagues. We won the 2009, 2010, and 2012 SPL US Opens. At the international RoboCup SPL competitions, we made the quarterfinals in 2009, won 3rd place in 2010 and 2013, and won the championship in 2012.
Research Topics:	Self localization, vision algorithms, multi-agent task allocation, obstacle avoidance, reinforcement learning
Competing in:	team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges
Team Report:	report.pdf
Logo not yet available UTH-CAR	Mexico Team Contact: Diego Mauricio Reyes, Alberto E. Petrilli Barceló Institutes: UTH UNACAR
Team Profile:	UTH-CAR is a new team in the SPL League. The team is formed by two Mexican institutions: the Technological University of Huejotzingo and the Autonomous University of Carmen. The project is formed by undergraduate students under the direction of researchers of both institutions.
Research Topics:	Humanoid Perception, Visual SLAM, Image Processing, Machine Learning.
Competing in:	drop-in player competition and technical challenges
Team Report:	team-report.pdf?