A Report on Research Issues that Surfaced during

the Competitions and Conference RoboCup-2001, the fifth international Robo-Cup competition and conference, was held for the first time in the United States, following RoboCup-2000 in Melbourne, RoboCup-1999 in Stockholm, RoboCup-1998 in Paris, and RoboCup-1997 in Osaka. RoboCup is a research-oriented initiative that pioneered the field of multirobot research starting in 1996 [1]. In those days, most robotics research was focused on single-robot issues. RoboCup opened a new horizon for multirobot research by focusing on teams of robots facing other teams of robots to accomplish specific goals. This challenging objective offers a broad and rich set of research and development questions; to wit, the construction of mechanically sound and robust robots, real-time effective perception algorithms, and dynamic behavior-based approaches to support teamwork. Background RoboCup has been a truly research-oriented endeavor. Every year, RoboCup researchers analyze the progress of the research and extend the competitions and demonstrations in the different leagues to create new challenges. The ultimate goal of RoboCup is to reach a point where teams of robots can successfully compete with human players. The RoboCup events move towards this goal. This article discusses, in detail, each one of the events at RoboCup-2001 with a focus on leagues with real robots. As an overview of the complete RoboCup-2001, and as an intro