RADHIKA NAGPAL: My name is Radhika Nagpal. I am a professor at Harvard University. And I do bio inspired robotics. I'm really interested in how groups can work together really well. ERIK SCHLUNTZ: So my name is Erik Schluntz. I'm studying electrical engineering at Harvard University. KATE DONAHUE: I'm part of RFC Cambridge. It's a joint Harvard-MIT team. We basically build robots to play soccer. RADHIKA NAGPAL: So the challenge of the Robocup competition, and it's an international competition that was started by people in the U.S. and Japan actually, is to create a team of robots that can play and possibly win against the world champions of the World Cup. KATE DONAHUE: There are teams from all around the world, and because we're so far spread out, it's really hard for us to get to test the robots against each other. So it's basically just sort of like a soccer match. There'll be some round robin games and then a final competition. And it's a chance to see how our robots stack up against others, and just exchange ideas. 

RADHIKA NAGPAL: If you think about little kids playing soccer and older people playing soccer, and think about the difference, like all the things that a little kid cannot do that an older person can. Computer science has to fill that whole gap. 

ERIK SCHLUNTZ: So you could say, I want the robot to go behind the ball to set up for a shot. But what you really have to tell the computer to do is, find the vector between the ball and the goal, and go there, minus an offset. And you really need the computer science people to express yourself in a way that the robots can understand. 

KATE DONAHUE: We all work on very different parts of the robot, but we really need to coordinate. It's a big challenge, and it's great when we all work on something together. So we'll build mechanical part of it, and then the electrical engineers will make the circuit boards, and the computer science people will have done their simulations, and then try and figure out how they can combine that and make the robot actually move. 

RADHIKA NAGPAL: I think, really, robotics is often about iteration. You do take one step forward, you take two steps back. You try to make one thing better, it makes something else worse. ERIK SCHLUNTZ: On the computer science team, we've made a lot of progress on our artificial intelligence. We threw out all the old strategy code. And we're making something that's much more adaptive to how the other team is playing. S on defense, we do things like ranking the most dangerous players and covering them in a man to man defense, based on that. And our offense, we generate these maps over the entire field of how good the spot is, and then assign a robot to use dynamically. RADHIKA NAGPAL: They need to be able to see, they need people to understand the world. They need to be able to move fast and turn and manipulate. They need to be able to notice their teammates and understand what they're doing. They need to have a strategy, and they need to adapt their strategy, because their opponent will be doing things all the time. And so you can't have a pre-determined plan. You have to be able to adapt. 

KATE DONAHUE: Since last year's competition, we've done a lot of advances, especially in the wheel design. We've shifted the motors down, and made everything much more compact, has allowed us to move our center of gravity down, which allows us to go faster. And also put in a dribbler, which is something we've wanted for a long time, but just haven't been able to make it fit until now. ERIK SCHLUNTZ: So each of the circuit boards on the robot has a different purpose. The four big ones, there and there and there, each control one of the motors. So that it basically takes a signal from the computer, decides how fast the wheels should spin, and sends the correct voltage to the wheels to do that. Like this board here controls this motor, and this one here controls this motor. We also have these two boards in the middle--this one right here controls charging these big capacitors, for the kicker. This board here controls when the robot kicks by using this light sensor right here. See when the ball is in front of it. It also controls the dribbler here, which we use to put back spin on the ball. So we can move backwards with it. 

KATE DONAHUE: It's not just you're trying to win, it's that you're trying to advance knowledge. And so you work on whatever you work on. And then you have to release a paper saying exactly what you did that's so cool, and how other people can do that. And they can build on your work. And so if there's something so advanced someone comes up with, everybody can sort of draw on that. You can have that for one year, and maybe nobody else can use it that year, but then the next year everybody else will modify it and done the same thing. And so it's really just moving forward and not staying in the same place. 

ERIK SCHLUNTZ: I definitely want to be working on robotics in my career. I think that there's just a lot of amazing things that can be done to automate things, to make cars safer, to make just really everything work automatically, so that people don't have to do things that are dangerous or dull. There's just so many things that robots can do better than people. And I think that, as a society, we need to start doing those to free people to do more interesting things.