The World Champions in Robotic Soccer

Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain that can be used to explore new problems and to demonstrate new techniques. We participated in RoboCup'98 in order to explore the problems of cooperation in multi-robot-systems and to demonstrate our self-localization techniques based on laser range nders. In this paper we sketch the main technical points of our team, give a description of the process of developing our team before and during the competition, and describe how we viewed the competition in general. 1 Robotic Soccer: A Scientiic Challenge Developing a team of soccer playing robots has been proposed by Mackworth 9] as a challenge for Artiicial Intelligence and Robotics. It requires to solve problems in the design of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, robotics, sensor fusion and more. In addition, it is necessary to integrate the solutions in order to build an autonomous soccer playing robot. For these reasons, robotic soccer seems to be an ideal domain for developing new solutions to the above mentioned problems and to study how to integrate diierent techniques. In order to put this challenge in concrete terms,