The University of Pennsylvania is hosting the U.S. RoboCup Open - SPL from Tuesday May 12 to Thursday May 14, 2020. RoboCup is an international robotics competition aimed to further research in robotics and artificial intelligence by offering competitions to promote advancements. The RoboCup Standard Platform League is a soccer league where all teams participate using the same robot, the NAO robot from SoftBank Robotics. These robots play fully autonomously and each one takes decisions separately from the others, but they still have to play as a team by using communications.

The official goal of the RoboCup Soccer Competition is:

By the middle of the 21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, complying with the official rules of FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup.

This goal is worked towards by introducing a rule change each year to make the robot soccer more like the soccer of humans.

The GRASP lab of The University of Pennsylvania has participated in Robocup since 1999. Former Penn Professor, and Director of the GRASP lab, Dr. Daniel Lee was elected to serve on the RoboCup board of trustees in 2013 and has served on the board ever since. Penn is also the home of the five time RoboCup Humanoid League champion team. Professor Camillo J. Taylor is currently the advisor of UPennalizers