Rocco: A RoboCup soccer commentator system

Abstract

With the attempt to enable robots to play soccer games, the RoboCup challenge poses a demanding standard problem for AI and intelligent robotics research. The rich domain of robot soccer, however, provides a further option for the investigation of a second class of intelligent systems which are capable of understanding and describing complex time-varying scenes. Such automatic commentator systems offer an interesting research perspective for additional integration of natural language and intelligent multimedia technologies. In this paper, first results concerning the realization of a fully automated RoboCup commentator will be presented. The system called Rocco is currently able to generate TV-style live reports for arbitrary matches of the RoboCup simulator league. Based upon our generic approach towards multimedia reporting systems, step-by-step even more advanced capabilities are to be added with future versions of the initial Rocco prototype.