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The UT Austin Villa Robotics Team recently won third place at the RoboCup@Home 2017 competition, in the category of Domestic Standard Platform League. The competition was held in Nagoya, Japan. Robocup was originally founded by Japanese researchers to develop robots that could play soccer well enough to eventually defeat world champion players. The idea was playfully implemented in order to fuse robot engineering with artificial intelligence and development. Now the original goal of the competition has expanded to include other areas and goals of robotics.

Today in Austin, pedestrians and cyclists account for more than 50% of all traffic deaths, even though they only make up about 20% of travelers on the roads. While the push towards automated vehicles could reduce these deaths, unless vehicles receive help from pedestrians, automated cars could become too cautious and risk avoidant to function efficiently.