UT Austin Villa 2014 Team Description Paper for the Standard Platform League Samuel Barrett, Katie Genter, Elad Liebman, Jacob Menashe, Sanmit Narvekar, Ryan Spring, Richard Teammco, Ruohan Zhang and Peter Stone Department of Computer Science The University of Texas at Austin 2317 Speedway Austin, Texas 78712 UTAustinVilla-legged@cs.utexas.edu http://www.cs.utexas.edu/ ˜ AustinVilla Abstract. This paper describes the research focus and ideas incorporated in the UT Austin Villa Standard Platform league team entering the RoboCup competi- tion in 2014. UT Austin Villa is a team representing the Department of Computer science at The University of Texas at Austin. 1 Introduction The UT Austin Villa Standard Platform Team has participated in every RoboCup com- petition since RoboCup 2003 in Padua (at which time it was still called the Four-Legged league). The team development began in mid-January of 2003 without any prior famil- iarity with the robots (AIBOs, at the time). After entering a fairly non-competitive team in RoboCup 2003, the team made several important advances. By the July 2004 com- petition that took place in Lisbon, Portugal, it was one of the top few teams, and it has continued to be competitive ever since, including a quarter-final appearance in 2007. In 2008 the team made the quarter-final of the Nao league and finished 4th in the AIBO league. In May 2009, the team placed 1st at the US Open in the Standard Platform League and placed 4th in the SPL at RoboCup 2009. In 2010, the team repeated as champions at the US Open and took 3rd place at RoboCup 2010. In 2012, the team won the US Open for a 3rd time and captured 1st place in the SPL at Robocup 2012 in Mexico City. In 2013, the team took 3rd place at RoboCup 2013. Throughout, we have placed extensive focus on identifying and developing the core research contributions from our team. The technical details of our past Nao and four-legged teams are available in our se- ries of technical reports [22–25, 7, 9, 1, 3], as well as in the inaugural book in the Mor- ganClaypool Synthesis Lecture Series on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learn- ing [21]. This book presents a roadmap for getting started on any vision-based and/or legged-based robot, using the Aibo as a case study. Additionally, the technical details of our 2012 Standard Platform Championship team can be found in our champions paper that was published in the RoboCup-2012: Robot Soccer World Cup XVI book [2].