May 11, 2015 08:51 PM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

The University of Miami won a prestigious award in the 2015 RoboCup US Open, school officials announced.

The RoboCane's, developed by students and faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences Computer Science Department, claimed victory for the first time since entering the autonomous soccer-playing robot competition, Phys.org reported.

This RoboCup US Open, which functions as the American Robocup playoffs, is one of three key events leading up to the annual World Championships. This year's championships will take place in July in Hefei, China.

After defeating 2012 world champions, The University of Texas at Austin's Austin Villa, 3-0 in Saturday's semi-final match, the RoboCanes met the Bowdoin College Northern Bites in the final match.

"The public has seen very close games the whole weekend and we have seen significant improvements among the teams. One of the new rules this year consists of the robots listening to the human referee starting a game with a whistle. RoboCanes was the only team that could handle this situation. We gained from that by having extra 15 seconds at the start of the game," Ubbo Visser, leader of the RoboCanes project, said in a statement.

The RoboCanes will face squads from Europe and Asia during the World Championships.

RoboCup aims to promote robotics and artificial intelligence research, by offering an integrated research platform that covers areas including vision, context recognition, strategy acquisition, motor control and more.

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