preRoboCup-96 was the first robotic soccer competition of any sort. It was held on November 5-7, 1996 in Osaka, Japan [#!PreRoboCup96-proceedings!#]. In conjunction with the IROS-96 conference, preRoboCup-96 was meant as an informal, small-scale competition to test the RoboCup soccerserver in preparation for RoboCup-97. 5 of the 7 entrants were from the Tokyo region. The other 2 were from Ch'ng at RMIT and Stone and Veloso from CMU.
The winning teams were entered by:
In this tournament, team strategies were generally quite straightforward. Most of the teams kept players in fixed locations, only moving them towards the ball when it was nearby.