The University of Science and Technology of China and the University of Technology, Sydney have forged a scientific partnership over the last few years. In 2008, we united our four-legged robot soccer teams to create a new team: WrightEagleUnleashed!

WrightEagleUnleashed! will compete again in the 2011 RoboCup World Robot Soccer Championships. Established with a vision to beat the world champion (human) soccer team by 2050, RoboCup is an exciting venue for robotics researchers to compete and collaborate on research into intelligence and robotics. Soccer provides a fun and familiar venue for competition that not only presents significant challenges to robotics research, but is a domain that inspires and captures the imaginations of the next generation of researchers. The many innovations in hardware and software arising from RoboCup have already found application in important and socially significant projects beyond the soccer field; and with the incredible rate of improvement, there will be many more to come.

In 2011, WrightEagleUnleashed! will be competing with the Nao robots in the standard platform leage. All teams within this league use identical robots - competition is played out in intelligence and strategy, rather than faster or stronger hardware. The standardized hardware offers further advantages in allowing teams to exchange ideas and share source code more easily. WrightEagleUnleashed! is, in fact, well positioned for this league: our team members have a strong record of innovative research within artificial intelligence, reasoning and knowledge representation.

The main objectives of the new team are to strengthen the relationship between researchers and students in the Multi-Agent System Lab at USTC in China and the Innovation and Technology Research Lab at UTS in Australia, and to generate new and exciting cognitive robotics research.

The main challenges for WrightEagle Unleashed! are twofold. First to develop a new robot soccer system that builds on the strengths of both teams, and second to overcome the barriers and obstacles that result from a team distributed across two distant countries and cultures.

WrightEagleUnleashed! combines the forces of the WrightEagle and Unleashed! four-legged teams.

WrightEagle was the first Chinese four-legged team, the first Chinese team to enter the international RoboCup competitions, and the champion team within Chinese domestic competitions. The team has continuously held international top-8 positions over the past three years, and was runner-up in coach competition during RoboCup 2001. The WrightEagle system is known for its robust play and highly refined movement and localization. (homepage)

Unleashed! is a former Australian champion team, winning Australian domestic competitions in 2004 and achieving first and second place in the challenges and game play respectively during RoboCup 2004. Having spent the years following 2004 in retirement to explore innovative extensions to the platform, the team has now joined forces with WrightEagle in an exciting return. The Unleashed! system is known for its strategies and performance. (homepage)

While both teams presented formidable competition to each other and the league, they shared a common philosophy and attitude to the game. Recognizing these shared values and supported by a Australian and Chinese bilateral cooperation grants, the teams tentatively begun exploring opportunities for cooperation. Through guest professorships, student exchanges, a jointly chaired conference on practical cognitive robotics and public robot exhibition matches in Suzhou, China (see the Chinese TV broadcast) and Perth, Australia; the teams developed a mutual respect and deep understanding of each other. From this seed grew an agreement to unite development efforts for RoboCup 2008. WrightEagleUnleashed! therefore combines two teams with exceptional synergy - having a shared philosophy, but complementary cultural and technological differences - all within the context of a joint team of considerable experience and resources.

Our experiment in 2008 proved to be an outstanding success: we placed second in the competition. In 2010, we continued the WrightEagleUnleashed! experiment. We cooperated more closely than ever before: instead of integrating existing architectures, we jointly developed an entirely new platform on entirely new robots. This platform is the basis for our entry in 2011.

Look-out! The Eagle has been Unleashed!

WrightEagleUnleashed! Questions, Comments?