RoboCup is a competition domain designed to advance robotics and AI research through a friendly competition. Small Size robot soccer is one of the RoboCup league divisions. Small Size robot soccer, or F180 as it is otherwise known, focuses on the problem of intelligent multi-agent cooperation and control in a highly dynamic environment with a hybrid centralized/distributed system.

A Small Size robot soccer game takes place between two teams of five robots each. Each robot must conform to the dimensions as specified in the F180 rules: The robot must fit within an 180mm diameter circle and must be no higher than 15cm unless they use on-board vision. The robots play soccer on a green carpeted field that is 6.05m long by 4.05m wide with an orange golf ball. Robots come in two flavours, those with local on-board vision sensors and those with global vision. Global vision robots, by far the most common variety, use an overhead camera and off-field PC to identify and track the robots as they move around the field. The overhead camera is attached to a camera bar located 4m above the playing surface. Local vision robots have their sensing on the robot itself. The vision information is either processed on-board the robot or is transmitted back to the off-field PC for processing. An off-field PC is used to communication referee commands and, in the case of overhead vision, position information to the robots. Typically the off-field PC also performs most, if not all, of the processing required for coordination and control of the robots. Communications is wireless and typically uses dedicated commercial FM transmitter/receiver units.

Building a successful team requires clever design, implementation and integration of many hardware and software sub-components into a robustly functioning whole making smallsize robot soccer a very interesting and challenging domain for research and education.