I have been involved with the University of Newcastle's robot soccer team, the NUBots for a number of years. The NUBots compete at the world championships each year. Students from computer science, computer engineering and maths and stats take part.

In this introductory seminar I will explain the ways that statistics is used in robot soccer. Statistics plays a part in localisation, how the robot works out where it is; vision, how the robot identifies the things it sees, and behaviour, how the robot decides what to do. As part of this overview I will introduce the statistical topics of classification, Bayesian belief updating, multivariate distributions, predictive models and cross-validation.