ITAS and the reverse RoboCup challenge

Abstract

ITAS is a tool that allows a human to play soccer in the RoboCup Soccer Simulator environment. This is essentially the reverse challenge to that of RoboCup. Instead of bringing the machine to the real world, ITAS strives to seamlessly interface man to the machine world. This presents a fundamental human-computer interaction design problem. This paper shows how the reverse RoboCup challenge can benefit the RoboCup community and what value it brings to robotics and AI research in large. An overview of the features of ITAS and its development using the Usability Engineering Lifecycle are then given, followed by a comparison with a related system, OZ-RP. ITAS is an open source project. The most recent releases are available at http://itas.sourceforge.net. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.