Comprehensive Omni-Directional Soccer Player Robots

RoboCup competitions were first proposed by Mackworth in 1993. The main goal of this scientific competition is to exploit, improve and integrate the methods and techniques from robotics, machine vision and artificial intelligence (AI) disciplines to create an autonomous team of soccer playing robots. At the time of preparing this chapter, RoboCup is organized in several different leagues including soccer simulator (2D and 3D), small size, middle size and legged robots, (Kitano, 1997a, Kitano et. al, 1997. Kitano, et. al, 1998). These leagues are designed to break down the problem into several venues so that the challenges can be addressed efficiently. Robots in middle-size league should operate autonomously only with local resources including local sensors, batteries and local vision. Each team can have a maximum number of four robots with a maximum footprint of 2000cm2. They can communicate with each other through a central computer via a radio link. The rules in the competition are the same as the international soccer rules as far as they are practical for robots (Kitano, 1997b). Recently, most conventional mobile robots have used a wheeled mechanism. Such mechanism consists of two independent driving wheels responsible for all needed robot motions (front-steering and rear-wheel driving mechanism). Motion restriction is a major problem in the use of such mechanism in mobile robots. There are also other suggested mechanisms such as universal wheel mechanisms, ball wheel, crawler and offset steered wheel mechanisms (Watanabe, 1998, West, 1992, Nakano, 1993).