Building Integrated Mobile Robots for Soccer Competition.pdfVIP

Building Integrated Mobile Robots for Soccer Competition Wei-Min Shen, Jafar Adibi, Rogelio Adobbati, Bonghan Cho, Ali Erdem, Hadi Moradi, Behnam Salemi, Sheila Tejada Computer Science Department / Information Sciences Institute University of Southern California 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 email: {shen, dreamteam}@isi.edu Abstract Robot soccer competition provides an excellent opportunity for robotics research. In particular, robot players in a soccer game must perform real-time visual recognition, navigate in a dynamic field, track moving objects, collaborate with teammates, and hit the ball in the correct direction. All these tasks demand robots that are autonomous (sensing, thinking, and acting as independent creatures), efficient (functioning under time and resource constraints), cooperative (collaborating with each other to accomplish tasks that are beyond individual’s capabilities), and intelligent (reasoning and planing actions and perhaps learning from experience). Furthermore, all these capabilities must be integrated into a single and complete system. To build such integrated robots, we should use different approaches from those employed in separate research disciplines. This paper describes our experience (problems and solutions) in this aspect for building soccer robots. Our robots share the same general architecture and basic hardware, but they have integrated abilities to play different roles (goal-keeper, defender or forward) and utilize different strategies in their behavior. Our philosophy in building these robots is to use the least possible sophistication to make them as robust as possible. In the 1997 RoboCup competition, these robots, formed a team called Dreamteam, played well and won the world championship in the middle-sized robot league. 1. Introduction The RoboCup task is for a team of fast-moving robots to cooperatively play soccer in a dynamic environment [4,5]. Since individual skills and teamwork are fundamental fa