(FORTUNE Magazine) – Here's a gnarly challenge: coaxing a bunch of autonomous robotic dogs into winning a soccer game. That's what engineering and computer science students did at the seventh annual Robo Cup American Open held at Carnegie Mellon University in May. The dogs were off-the-shelf Aibos donated by Sony, and student teams wrote software that let the four-legged creatures "collaborate" with one another via radio links in pursuit of victory. CMU computer science professor Manuela Veloso--also vice president of the International Robo Cup Federation--says the competition is a steppingstone to a much tougher goal set for 2050: beating human soccer players with a team of harder-to-balance anthropoid bipeds.

Goalies use their onboard cameras and three-jointed legs to block the ball as best they can. Blue dogs are programmed to aim for the yellow goal; red dogs shoot for the blue goal (not pictured).

Students are relegated to the sidelines once the game begins. At the end of the competition, each team's code is made public, and the strategizing for next year's competition begins.

Aibos are pretty good at aiming and kicking the ball (special software algorithms let them kick with their heads), but the dogs have a harder time "dribbling" once they're in possession.

Markers are colored to help the players figure out where they are. If the dogs tip over, human referees set them upright, and the robots reorient themselves using their vision systems.

The ball is orange so that the color-discriminating dogs, which play in teams of four, can follow it down a field the size of a Ping-Pong table.

Victory in this match went to Carnegie Mellon's CMPack '03, which beat the MetroBots team (made up of students from Columbia, Rutgers, and Brooklyn College). The score? A shutout: The home team won 9-0.