RoboCup 2006: Robot Soccer World Cup X

Preface The 10th RoboCup International Symposium was held on the 19th and 20th of June 2006 at the Fair & Convention Center in Bremen, Germany, immediately after the 2006 Soccer, Rescue and Junior Competitions. RoboCup is more and more seen by the robotics community as a significant approach to the evalua- tion of the effectiveness of the proposed solutions to the many difficult robotics problems. The RoboCup International Symposium hosted scientific contributions in all the areas relevant to RoboCup Competitions. The number of submissions to the Symposium increased again and totalled 143. Each paper was reviewed by at least three Program Committee members. The Program Committee included both researchers involved in RoboCup and other scientists from outside the RoboCup community. Papers that received dissenting recommendations were discussed among the reviewers, moderated by the co-Chairs. The final decisions were made by the co-Chairs, which selected 22 submissions as full papers and 36 submissions as posters. This means an acceptance rate of less than 16% for full papers and less than 41% considering posters. The Symposium was run in single-track to allow coverage of all robotic- related topics by all attendees. We had 5 sessions for oral presentations and two poster sessions. We were also delighted to have two outstanding invited speakers. Hod Lipson (Cornell University, U.S.A.) spoke about his work on biologically- inspired robotics in his talk “Biologically-inspired robotics: From evolving to self-reproducing machines.” Sebastian Thrun (Stanford University, U.S.A.) de- scribed how his team won the DARPA Grand Challenge in his talk ”Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge.” The Symposium co-Chairs selected a few papers as nominees for the Best Paper Award and for the Best Student Paper Award; the RoboCup trustees made the final decision and selected ”A 3D Simulator of Multiple Legged Robots based on USARSim” by M. Zaratti, M. Fratarcangeli, L. Iocchi as Best Paper and ”Half Field Offense in RoboCup Soccer: A Multiagent Reinforcement Learning Case Study” by S. Kalyanakrishnan, Y. Liu, P. Stone as Best Student Paper. As the quality of the Symposium depends heavily on the quality of the generous Program Committee members, we wish to particularly thank them for their work, which was very hard and concentrated in a very short time. We also like to thank the Local Organizing Committee, headed by Ubbo Visser, for turning Robocup 2006 into such a memorable and enjoyable event. Last but not least we thank Stefan Schiffer for his help in preparing these proceedings. Congratulations to the RoboCup Competitions and the RoboCup Sympo- sium, which celebrated their decennial this year in Bremen! See you all in July 2007 in Atlanta for the next event! December 2006 Gerhard Lakemeyer Elizabeth Sklar Domenico G. Sorrenti Tomoichi Takahashi