From String-Puppets to Autonomous Systems On the Role of On-board Control in the Small Robots League

We discuss in this article the positive prospects and the pitfalls of the Small Robots League of RoboCup in respect to on-board control and other on-board features for the players. For this purpose, we introduce a classiication of teams based on a general set of components for players. With this background, we motivate the importance of fostering on-board features for the players and present beneecial and negative aspects of size constraints. As our contribution to a fruitful exploitation of on-board features, 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 extreme exible way. For this purpose, the RoboCube provides quite some 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 eeectors, including their on-board processing, the RoboCube allows to explore a large space of diierent robots and team setups. In addition to the basic system, we present the option to enhance RoboCube with high-resolution color vision to a so-called VisionCube. In doing so, we exploit the possibilities of a completely new technology in imaging based on C-MOS chips. Among other advantages, the particular imager used in our design allows a selective read-out of pixels. Unlike CCDs where a complete frame has to be read, the VisionCube can read subsets of the 512512 colored pixels of its imager in an extremely fast way. This makes it feasible to explore the challenging option of local vision with on-board processing.