Main competition, drop-in player competition, and challenges:
Austrian Kangaroos, Berlin United – Nao Team Humboldt (BU-NaoTH), B-Human, Cerberus, Nao-Team HTWK, HULKs, Linköping Humanoids, MRL-SPL, Nao Devils Dortmund, Northern Bites, NTU RoboPAL, RoboCanes, RoboEireann, UNSW Australia, SPQR Team, Philosopher, TJArk, UChile Robotics Team, UPennalizers, UT Austin Villa
Drop-in player competition and challenges:
Blue Spider, Camellia Dragons, Edinferno, JoiTech-SPL, MiPal, Team-NUST, UnBeatables, WrightOcean, Z-Knipsers
Alternate teams for the main competition:
1st Alternate: Z-Knipsers
2nd Alternate: Camellia Dragons
3rd Alternate: MiPal
4th Alternate: Team-NUST
5th Alternate: JoiTech-SPL
International SPL 2015 Competitors
Note: The following listing is a work in progress, and should not be considered to be an extensive list of all qualified 2015 SPL teams. Team information is being posted as it is received from teams.
 Austrian Kangaroos |
 Austria Team Contact: Institutes: |
| 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: | Biomimetrics, safety and security, computational intelligence, computer vision |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Research Report 2014 Whistle Detector |
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 Berlin United – Nao Team Humboldt (BU-NaoTH) |
 Germany Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | Nao Team Humboldt (NaoTH) is part of the Adaptive Systems group at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a member of the joint research group “Berlin United”, together with the RoboCup team FUmanoids (KidSize League) from the Freie Universität Berlin. Established at the end of 2007, NaoTH is the successor of the Aibo Team Humboldt (part of the former German Team). The team mainly consist of graduate and undergraduate students and is closely involved in the teaching process. At the RoboCup world championship 2014 in Brazil we reached the quarterfinals in the main competition and were selected as one of the top 5 players in the drop-in challenge who constituted the all-star team. At the IranOpen we won 2nd place. Our research interests spread across the whole spectrum ranging from software architecture for autonomous robots, basic motion control, vision, perception, and modeling to high level planning. |
| 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 2014 |
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 B-Human |
Germany Team Contact: Institutes: |
| 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, 2013, and 2014, as well as the Drop-in Player competitions at both the RoboCup German Open 2014 and the RoboCup 2014. In addition, B-Human team members earned the Best Paper Award at the RoboCup Symposiums 2010 and 2013. In 2015, we intend again to participate in both the RoboCup German Open and the RoboCup World Championship. |
| 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 2014 |
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 Blue Spider |
 China Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | Blue Spider, founded in 2009, is a collegial team which belongs to Xi?an Jiaotong University Engineering Workshop. Our main task is to develop high-performance software in order to drive Nao Robots to play better in football matches. The goal of our team is to participate in the RoboCup World Championships and also improve students? ability of programming as well as innovation practices. At present, our team consists of two professors, three postgraduate students and seven undergraduate students. In 2013, we took part in the Chinese RoboCup Open Competition and achieved the fourth-place finish in the Standard Platform League competitive programs. At the same time, we do some related scientific researches through the platform of Nao Robots and take an active part in public welfare activities as well. With the efforts of all team members, we believe that we will achieve more success at the RoboCup World Championships. |
| Research Topics: | Not available |
| Competing in: | drop-in player competition and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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 Camellia Dragons |
 Japan Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | Camellia Dragons was newly organized in October, 2013 at Aichi Prefectural University (APU), Japan and also a newcomer to RoboCup Standard Platform League (SPL). The team consists of two masters students, five undergraduate students, and a faculty. All of them are affiliated with Intelligent Machine Learning laboratory (IML lab) at APU. The first big challenge is to participate in the SPL main competition for RoboCup Japan Open 2014. The challenge finally brought the first prize in the competition. The team is really motivated to challenge the SPL competition for RoboCup 2015 to be held in Hefei, China. |
| Research Topics: | Cooperative behavior, Collision Avoidance, AutoBalancer, Rhythmic walking, Degree of malfunction, Dynamic role assignment, Human-robot interaction, Cloud robotics |
| Competing in: | drop-in player competition and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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 Cerberus |
 Turkey Team Contact: Institutes: |
| 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 2015 team consists of seven 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 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, reinforcement learning, computer vision. |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Team Report |
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 Edinferno |
 United Kingdom Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | Our team made its RoboCup debut in the 2011 world cup held in Istanbul, Turkey, where we entered both in the Standard Platform League and the 2D Simulation League. We competed in the 2012 Mexico City RoboCup competition, where our team reached the quarter-finals, losing to the defending champions. We have participated from every year since, and from 2015 we are constructing from the ground up a Robot Operating System (ROS) based infrastructure. With past years experience and ample ROS knowledge, we aim to participate on the drop-in competition and technical challenges, and provide a solid foundation for future iterations building towards the main competition. |
| Research Topics: | Autonomous decision making under uncertainty, learning in single/multi-agent environments, HRI and strategic interaction and navigation through intention prediction. |
| Competing in: | drop-in player competition and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Edinferno 2015 Team Report |
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 HULKs – Hamburg Ultra Legendary Kickers |
Germany Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | The HULKs are a new team, that participates in the World Championship for the second time. Our team members are mostly undergraduate students. We have built our code base from scratch. |
| Research Topics: | Inter-Robot Communication via sound, Control Systems, Efficient Software Design |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Team Report |
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 JoiTech-SPL |
Japan Team Contact: |
| Team Profile: | Team JoiTech-SPL is originally derived from RoboCup team JoiTech, which participated in competitions of Humanoid AdultSize League since Japan Open 2010. Team JoiTech is composed of masters and doctoral students at Emergent Robotics Laboratory, Osaka University. This team was first started up as a new team in cooperation with students at Osaka Institute of Technology in RoboCup Japan Open 2010. The team name, JoiTech, is an acronym for ?JEAP and Osaka Institute of Technology?, and it also means ?joint team with Institute of Technology? and ?enjoy technology?. The team had focused on Humanoid League AdultSize for several years. In RoboCup 2013 it took the league champion and best humanoid award. Then we decided to shift our focus to Standard Platform League. As the new team also kept the spirit of the original team, we design our team name by adding ?SPL? to the original team name ?JoiTech?. |
| Research Topics: | Computer vision, Machine Learning, Multi-Agent Cooperation, Optimization |
| Competing in: | drop-in player competition and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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 Linköping Humanoids |
 Sweden Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | Linköping Humanoids is a joint effort at Linköping university between the student association FIA Robotics, the Division for Artificial Intelligence and Integrated Computer Systems (AIICS) at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) and the Computer Vision Laboratory (CVL) at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ISY). This is the first year we are participating in the SPL, but members of the team have been participating in the Simulation League and in RoboCup Junior previously. Last year we won the Humabot Challenge at the IEEE RAS Humanoids Conference. |
| Research Topics: | AI, cognitive robotics, computer vision, multi-agent systems, machine learning, stream reasoning, and software development for autonomous systems |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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 MiPal |
  Australia Spain Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | The research agenda of Machine Intelligence and Pattern Analysis Laboratory (MiPal) is to develop the software platform to integrate machine intelligence capabilities and to deploy them in integrated systems like autonomous mobile robots. In particular, we are interested on placing pattern analysis, machine l |
| Research Topics: | Robotic Middleware, Model-Driven Development, Software Architectures, Vision and Pattern Analysis, Task Planning, Robotic Architectures, Modeling Robotic Behaviour. |
| Competing in: | drop-in player competition and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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 MRL-SPL |
 Iran Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | MRL SPL team, under the supervision of Qazvin Azad University (QIAU), is one of the research groups of the Mechatronics Research Laboratory (MRL), dedicated to work in the field of biped robots. MRL’s presence in RoboCup different leagues since 2002, results in numerous successful achievements both in the areas of research and competition. MRL SPL team has been an active participant of world RoboCup 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: | Software Development Quality Assurance Methods and Software Development Processes Software Framework Computer Vision Calibration Free Image Processing using Bayesian Classification Online Camera Displacement Tracking and Calibrating Localization and World Modeling Active Head Motion and Control Behavior Control Multi-Agent Cooperation and Coordination Automated Planning and Scheduling Bayesian Estimation for High-Level Game Planning Motion KinetoStatic and Dynamic Analysis Ground Reference Points in Biped Locomotion Off-Line and Online Walking Pattern Generation Simplified Dynamic Models of a Biped Robot Considering the Dynamics of Upper Body |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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 Nao Devils Dortmund |
Germany Team Contact: Institutes: |
| 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: | Team Report 2014 |
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 Nao-Team HTWK |
Germany Team Contact: Institutes: |
| 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 2009-2014 as well as the RoboCup German Open 2009-2014. |
| Research Topics: | Machine Learning, Biped Walking, Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Robot Coordination, Computer Vision, Localization |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Team Report 2014 |
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 Northern Bites |
 USA Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | The Northern Bites are a team of undergraduates from a small (less than 2000 total students) Liberal Arts College in Maine. The College has only four computer science faculty and no graduate students. The team has competed in RoboCup since 2006 and during that time has won a World Championship in 2007, finished second in 2009 and third in 2008. The team also has numerous top 8 finishes. |
| Research Topics: | Cognitive robotics, machine vision, robot architecture, machine learning |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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 NTU RoboPAL |
 Taiwan Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | The team consists of graduate and undergraduate students highly interested in solving real-world multirobot research issues in terms of perception, behavior, and motion. 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: | Not available |
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 Philosopher |
 Estonia Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | Philosopher is a robot soccer team from the University of Tartu, Estonia, and so far, has been the only RoboCup participant from Estonia. The Team was established in January 2013, and successfully managed to prepare the materials, robots and strategies, as well as gain funding, within a comparatively-short time-interval, leading it to participate in the RoboCup Standard Platform League Championship 2014. We are also planning to participate in the 2015 Competitions, and have already been qualified to do so. In the 2014 Competitions, a couple of accredited companies sponsored our participation, and due to the Team’s satisfactory performance, in the upcoming competitions, not only they are supporting us again, but also some other companies have shown interest in sponsoring us heretofore. Our team consists of six student members, namely, Siim Schults, Viljard Puusepp, Rainer Keerdo, Anastasia Bolotnikova, Andres Traumann and Morteza Daneshmand, and two supervisors, namely, Gholamreza Anbarjafari and Alvo Aabloo. All the team members are doing, or already have done, their studies on subjects related to robotics. Besides, at the moment, they are constantly working on tasks contributing to the enhancement of their own part, which fall, mainly, in the areas of self-localization system, automatization of color calibration process, robot motion melioration and game strategy. |
| Research Topics: | multi-agent systems, game strategy, self localization, automatic color calibration, robot motion |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Team Report |
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 RoboCanes |
USA Team Contact: Institutes: |
| 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 places in the 2012 and 2014 World Cup, won the German Open 2011 and was runner-up at the Iran Open 2012. It is the team’s 4th year in the SPL. |
| Research Topics: | Learnable knowledge representation, motions, biped walking control, multi-agent cooperation, self-localization, obstacle avoidance, parameter optimization, reinforcement learning. |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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 RoboEireann |
 Ireland Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | RoboEireann is Ireland’s only SPL team and comprises students and staff from the Maynooth University Electronic Engineering and Computer Science departments. In previous competitions we have attained 1st place in RoboCup 2008 as part of NUManoids (a joint effort with Newcastle University, Australia), 1st place in RoboCup 2011 Technical Challenge, 2nd place in the 2012 German Open, and the quarter-finals of RoboCup 2013. |
| Research Topics: | Computer vision, robust localization, multi-agent behaviour, closed-loop kinematics |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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 SPQR Team |
 Italy Team Contact: |
| 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-robot coordination, multi-object tracking and self localization, real-time |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Qualification Report 2015 |
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 Team-NUST |
 Pakistan Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | Team-NUST was established formally in 2013 in the Legged Robotics Group of RISE Research Center, SMME, NUST, Pakistan with the aim of carrying out research in the rapidly progressing field of humanoid robotics, artificial intelligence, machine vision, motion planning, kinematics and navigation; with the motivation to participate in RoboCup Standard Platform League. |
| Research Topics: | Robust and predictable kicking motion, multi-agent cooperative behavior, motion planning, localization and mapping, probabilistic reasoning. |
| Competing in: | drop-in player competition and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Team Description Paper |
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 TJArk |
China Team Contact: Institutes: |
| 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 graduates and undergraduates. All the members of this team are from Control Science and Control Engineering Department. The TJArk participated in the RoboCup SPL competition from 2006 through 2014. We entered the quarter finals in RoboCup 2007 and RoboCup 2008, and Play-In Round in RoboCup2014. We are the SPL Champion in RoboCup China Open in 2013 and in 2014. In 2015, we intend to participate in the RoboCup World Championship and 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 |
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 UChile Robotics Team |
 Chile Team Contact: Institutes: |
| 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: | Not available |
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 UnBeatables |
 Brazil Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | Created in 2014 and affiliated with the University of Brasilia, UnBeatables is the only Brazilian team that has ever participated in the Standard Platform division of the Robocup. Composed of mostly graduation students we have achieved titles for the drop-in only category in both events we have participated: The 2014 Robocup in Joao Pessoa, Brazil and the 2014 LARC (Latin American Robotics Competition) in Sao Carlos, Brazil. This year we hope to expand our team and to do our best in the Robocup. |
| Research Topics: | Motion control, human-robot interaction, indoor mapping and localization |
| Competing in: | drop-in player competition and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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 UNSW Australia |
Australia Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | UNSW Australia is the UNSW Australia’s team in the RoboCup SPL. The team is mostly made up of undergraduate students from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, with some postgraduate and alumni members. Undergraduate students are often enrolled in an Honours thesis or Special Project course as part of their studies. |
| 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: ? further develop reasoning methods that incorporate uncertainty and real-time constraints and that integrate with the statistical methods used in SLAM and perception ? develop methods for using estimates of uncertainty to guide future decision making so as to reduce the uncertainty ? extend these methods for multi-robot cooperation ? use symbolic representations as the basis for human-robot interaction ? 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 ? 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: | Team Report Code Release |
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 UPennalizers |
USA Team Contact: Institutes: |
| 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 2014 SPL participant as well as a 2014 US Open SPL participant. |
| Research Topics: | Computer vision, self localization, path planning and obstacle avoidance, feedback based walk/motion engine, multi-robot communication and collaboration. |
| Competing in: | team competition, drop-in player competition, and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Team Report |
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 UT Austin Villa |
 USA Team Contact: Institutes: |
| 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: | Not available |
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 WrightOcean |
China Team Contact: Institutes: |
| Team Profile: | WrightOcean, a team which belongs to Lab of Robotics, School of Information and Electrical Engineering, Ludong University in China, was established in April, 2012. It is a young and passionate team, and all of the members are undergraduates keen on robotics. The WrightOcean team participated in the Standard Platform League of RoboCup China Open in 2013 for the first time, and we were the runner-up to the TJArk (a team from Tongji University) in a team competition. In 2014, we took part in three technical challenges and shared the third place with Dalian University of Technology. We look forward to share ideas with other teams coming from different countries and regions. |
| Research Topics: | Self localization, vision algorithms, sound recognition algorithms |
| Competing in: | drop-in player competition and technical challenges |
| Team Report: | Not available |
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