ISocRob - Intelligent Society of Robots

The SocRob project was born as a challenge for multidisciplinary research on broad and generic approaches for the design of a cooperative robot society, involving Control, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence researchers. A case study on Robotic Soccer played by a team of 3 robots has started two years ago and was first tested last year during RoboCup98. This experience has clearly revealed that the robotic soccer environment is a sufficiently rich, complex and dynamic testbed to study new methodologies both on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Therefore, the SocRob team is currently working on the SocRob project improvements and intends to compete at the World Cup of Robotic Soccer, RoboCup99, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in the middle-size league. In this paper the basic aspects of last year implementation as well as the improvements made meanwhile are briefly recalled and presented. Naturally, a special emphasis is given here to the novel solutions proposed for this year implementation, the results obtained and the expected future developments.