IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015 - 43

manuela Veloso
ieee Fellow

57
aGe

Robotics researcher,
Carnegie Mellon University
occupation

into the discipline, shaping
bright minds into skilled
researchers and designers.
The 2013 championship in
the Netherlands attracted 410
teams from 45 countries and
40,000 spectators. It's safe
to say that the phenomenon
would not have gone as far if
not for Veloso's pioneering
research, energetic promotion, and keen foresight.
Veloso's introduction of
artificial-intelligence techphotoGraph by

Ross Mantle

Pittsburgh
location

niques to RoboCup was a
game changer, says Minoru
Asada, a robotics professor
at Osaka University, in Japan,
and a founder of RoboCup. As
a leader in RoboCup and in
related research and education,
Veloso has mightily advanced
robotics, he says, calling her
work "an invaluable bridge"
between AI and robotics.
Veloso walks fast and talks
in bursts, her spr y body

She promoted the international robotics competition as
a vehicle for training young researchers and advancing
autonomous robots.
hero moment

barely containing the energy
inside. Back in the early
1990s, Veloso was a freshly
appointed professor at CMU,
where she'd received her
Ph.D., and she had an interest in artificial intelligence. In
1994, at an AI conference, she
saw a demo of some soccerpl ay i n g rob ot s. D e spite
growing up in soccer-crazed
Portugal, she cared little for
the sport. But as a challenge
for autonomous systems, it
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was perfect, she says. And so
she became one of the first
researchers to jump at it.
She started by developing
soccer simulations with her
student Peter Stone, now a
professor of computer science
at the University of Texas at
Austin. Soon after, Veloso
and other students began
designing small robots that
could observe, reason, act,
co operate, and learn while
moving about on a field. It
took her team two years to get
the motors, controllers, and
sensors right. Even trickier
was figuring out how to make
five of them play together.
In 1997 she cofou nded
the RoboCup Federation
and helped launch the first
games. She later held various leadership roles and
continues to advise the CMU
team. The change over the
years has been remarkable.
Early on, researchers were
lucky if their soccer-playing
automatons moved as programmed. These days, teams
of humanoid robots play real
games, complete with defensive and offensive tactics and
penalty shoot-outs.
That sophistication is due
in no small part to Veloso's
own contributions to AI. The
roughly coffee-can-size cylindrical robots that her team
competes with in the Small
Size Robot League-in which
they hold the most finals
titles-plan their moves with
stunning accuracy, shooting balls with such force
that they've left dents in her
lab's walls. The team's early
bots were made with Erector
sets, but even then their
intelligence surpassed that
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015
