The Robot World Cup Initiative (RoboCup) is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. The rst RoboCup competition will be held at IJCAI-97, Nagoya. In order for a robot team to actually perform a soccer game, various technologies must be incorporated including: design principles of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, robotics, and sensor-fusion. Contrary to AAAI robot competition, which is tuned for a single heavy-duty robot, RoboCup is a task for a team of multiple fast-moving robots under a dynamic environment. Although RoboCup's nal target is a world cup with real robots, RoboCup oers a software platform for research on the software aspects of RoboCup. This paper describes technical challenges involved in RoboCup, rules, and simulation environment. RoboCup as a Standard AI Problem We propose a Robot World Cup (...