Design of a Team of Soccer Playing Robots

This paper describes the design of the RoboRoos, a fully autonomous robot soccer team. A soccer robot has similar needs to a human soccer player; fast and agile motion, good control of the ball, strong kicking ability, robust navigation and coordination of actions with other members of the team. Each robot is mechanically designed to meet these needs of a competitive soccer player. Mechanically the RoboRoos feature a fast, simple and compact omni-directional drive system, a powerful kicker and a ball control mechanism. The electrical hardware controls these mechanical systems and interfaces to a high speed, low error rate wireless communication module. Software on the microcontroller controls the actuators and provides intelligence in the form of behaviour selection, computationally fast and robust navigation and motion control. The RoboRoo team has competed in the last five RoboCup competitions, demonstrating good performance against other robot soccer teams. The RoboRoos have also demonstrated superiority against human controlled robots, scoring 196 – 24 at a public demonstration.