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Henry Work, who graduated from Bowdoin College last year, was the Northern Bites’ adviser this year. Here, he watches his some of his robots work the field.

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Henry Work, left, and Mark McGranaghan watch as one of their robotic dogs goes after the ball on the Bowdoin computer lab’s “soccer field.”

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Each Northern Bites robot is equipped with a memory stick, which controls its actions on the soccer field. The robots communicate wirelessly with each other, and each has a camera in its snout that processes images.

Bowdoin is the new world champion in a sport that relies on four-legged robots named after characters in the "Star Wars," "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and "Lord of the Rings" movie franchises – and on computer programs written by what one competitor admits are "nerds."

The college's Northern Bites team won the world Robocup championship in Atlanta this month, returning victorious to a deserted campus where most of students graduated or left for the summer in May.

Despite the lack of fanfare, Associate Professor Eric Chown and a couple of students refused to let the moment pass unnoticed.

They gathered in Searles Hall recently to talk about their victory and what it means to the college.

"I am ecstatic, it's so ridiculous," said Henry Work, who graduated last year but opted to stay in Brunswick to help coach the team. "Going in, I told my friends, 'If we get lucky we might finish in the top four.' I never thought we could win the whole thing."

Twenty-four teams from around the world were invited to compete in the 2007 Robocup championship, held July 1-8 in Atlanta.

Robocup is soccer played by robotic dogs on a 19-foot-by-13- foot carpeted field that has to be vacuumed to prevent lint and dust buildup.

Each robot is equipped with a memory stick. Once a robotic dog is placed on the playing field, the memory stick controls its reactions.

Students cannot control the robots remotely, but robots can communicate wirelessly with each other.

Each robot has a camera in its snout that processes images. Those images allow the robots to figure out where they are on the playing field and what to do next.

Robot dogs must use their heads, legs and chests to push balls toward goals.

Unless a shot is blocked by the goalie or another defender, a goal counts as one point.

Bowdoin beat more experienced and well equipped teams, such as the Microsoft Hellhounds of Germany,to get into the final four.

They crushed a strong team from Carnegie Mellon University by a score of 8-0 in the semifinals and defeated the Nubots -- a team from Newcastle, Australia, that was favored to win it all -- by a score of 5-1 in the finals.

"I am thrilled; but as the competition wore on, it got less and less surprising, because we knew going in that we had a strong team," said Mark McGranaghan, a sophomore from Pennington, N.J., who helped to write the robots' localization program, which helps orient them on the playing field.

Chown, who formed the team two years ago, said the victory is huge for Bowdoin. He teaches computer science, as well as a course in robotics.

"It gives my students the chance to stand toe to toe with some of the best and brightest students in the world. It proves to them that we are just as smart and that computer science at Bowdoin College is serious business," Chown said.

It wasn't always that way.

Just two years ago, Chown struggled to field a team for the U.S. Open championships. He went to the competition with one student – Greydon Foil, who has since graduated.

"It wasn't a case of a lack of interest among the students. It was just there was no belief, a sense that we could pull this off," Chown said.

Though they did not fare well in 2005, Chown and Foil made a statement that a small liberal arts college with limited funding for equipment – Sony robots cost about $2,000 each – could take the field with some of the brightest and best equipped Robocup teams in the world.

"The team consisted of the two of us," Chown said. "We could barely do anything. We were terrible."

Chown said the program got a boost at the 2006 world Robocup championships in Bremen, Germany, where Bowdoin defeated two teams to finish 10th overall.

Though Bowdoin did not reach the championship match, the team caught the eye of...