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Hugel, Vincent; Bonnin, Patrick; Bouramoué, Jean Christophe; Blazevic, Pierre
doi: 10.1163/156855300741401pmid: N/A
Legged robots taking part in real multi-agent activities represent a very innovative challenge. This domain of research requires developments in three main areas. First, without any feedback information from the environment, there is no way for robots to achieve some tasks autonomously. Fortunately, the quadruped 'Sony' prototypes on which all experiments are carried out are equipped with an enhanced vision system; thanks to its CCD camera located in its head, the robot can obtain color images of the scene around it. Extracting relevant information from the images captured is not easy since it must be done onboard in real time. Moreover, image treatment procedures should have high process rates for the robot to react quickly in front of unexpected events. A special vision module composed of three parts has been designed for these purposes. The second point to focus on is the walking ability of the robot. Quadrupeds are designed to move efficiently and rapidly on flat ground. The objective of the walking module is to generate appropriate walking patterns allowing the machine to walk in the desired direction. Walking gaits are produced like reflexes by the robot itself to adapt to the situation. With regard to the design of these gaits, emphasis has been put on increasing speed and mastering transitions. Finally, the machine should be given a minimum of intelligence since it has to manage vision information and its walking gaits by itself. When involved in situations of cooperation or competition or both, like in a soccer game, a high-level supervision task is welcome. This paper presents detailed developments of these three points and describes how they are implemented on a real robot.
Birk, Andreas; Kenn, Holger; Walle, Thomas
doi: 10.1163/156855300741410pmid: N/A
We present the most recent version of our RoboCube system, a special robot controller hand-tailored for players in the small robots league. The RoboCube is conceptualized to implement players with as many on-board features as possible in an extremely flexible way. For this purpose, the RoboCube provides significant computation power and memory as well as a multitude of I/O interfaces within the space constraints. As it facilitates the use of many sensors and effectors, including their on-board processing, the RoboCube allows us to explore a large number of different robots and team set-ups.
doi: 10.1163/156855300741429pmid: N/A
MAPS (Multi-Agent Planning System) is a system for multi-agent coordination that has been developed in the robot soccer domain. It uses potential fields to model the environment and provide directives for the robots. The key feature that enables successful coordination is the use of a shared world model. This paper describes MAPS and demonstrates it as a viable coordination system for use in multiple robot domains.
doi: 10.1163/156855300741438pmid: N/A
We designed a family of completely autonomous mobile robots with local intelligence. We developed a controller with a variety of digital and analog I/O facilities and the operating system RoBIOS, which allows maximum flexibility. The robots have a number of on-board sensors, including vision, and do not rely on global sensor systems. The on-board computing power is sufficient to analyze several color images per second. This enables the robots to perform several different task such as navigation, map generation or intelligent group behavior and does not limit them to the game of robot soccer.
doi: 10.1163/156855300741447pmid: N/A
Typical features of entry-, junior- and advanced-level robot contests are presented. The RoboCup educational survey method is considered. Characteristic data on the team members, their activities and motivation to participate in the program, as indicated by the questionnaire results, are discussed. New initiatives directly related to education are derived.
Piaggio, Maurizio; Sgorbissa, Antonio; Zaccaria, Renato
doi: 10.1163/156855300741456pmid: N/A
In recent years there has been great interest in robot software control architectures. However, although many interesting solutions have been presented, most of the research problems tackled related to a single robot perception, navigation and action in everyday environments. Instead, most of the practical applications of mobile robotics for service tasks in civilian environments consist of systems composed of multiple robots communicating with each other, with external sensing and actuating devices, and with external supervising workstations. RoboCup offers a great opportunity to deal with this problem. In fact the software architecture of a robot soccer player must allow successful intra-robot integration of the different activities (visual perception, path planning, strategy planning, motion control, etc.) spanning many different types of representation (raw sensor data, images, symbolic plans, etc.) and it must also guarantee successful inter-robot integration by supporting communication and cooperation. This paper focuses on this problem, presenting ETHNOS-IV - a programming environment for the design of a real-time control system composed of different robots, devices and external supervising or control stations - which has been successfully used within the Italian ART robot team in the RoboCup-99 competition. ETHNOS provides support from three main point of views which will be addressed in detail: inter-robot and intra-robot communication, realtime task scheduling, and software engineering and code reuse. Experimental results illustrating the advantages of this approach will also be presented.
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