The Ulm Sparrows 2003 Gerhard Kraetzschmar, Gerd Mayer, Hans Utz, Philipp Baer, Martin Claus, Ulrich Kaufmann, Markus Lauer, Simon Natterer, Sebastian Przewoznik, Roland Reichle, Alexander Reisser, Axel Roth, Miriam Schmidt, Christoph Sitter, Florian Sterk, and G¨ unther Palm University of Ulm, Neuroinformatics, James-Franck-Ring, 89069 Ulm, Germany Abstract. The Ulm Sparrows is a team of researchers, students, and robots competing in the RoboCup middle-size league. This paper de- scribes our research approach, major results achieved so far, and current work. 1 Introduction The Ulm Sparrows RoboCup team exists since end of 1997. It is a mainly student- driven activity, and serves both as a research as well as a teaching tool. We build and maintain a team of robots for the middle-size league. Initially, the team was active in the simulation league as well, but the team decided to concentrate on MSL after 1999. 2 Approach Aside of the teaching aspects, the team also has a clear research focus, which is centered around the general theme of adaptivity and learning in cooperative mulirobot teams. We are in particular interested in the following issues: – Developing methods for fast on-site adaptation of various functional methods to on-site playing conditions (autonomous calibration, etc.). – Studying the integration of various learning methods into hybrid methods. – Studying the interaction of various modules learning simultaneously. – Autonomy in cooperative, communicating multirobot teams. – Architectural and middleware support for learning and adaptivity. – Systematic experimental evaluation of multirobot teams. We follow a behavior-based approach and tend to view architectural issues more in a bottom-up manner. More information on our approach and its development over the past years can be in past team description papers, which are the the various RoboCup books.