We present an approach for coordinating a team of soccer playing robots, used by Clockwork Orange in the RoboCup middle-size league. It is based on the idea of dynamically distributing roles among the team members and adds the notion of a global team strategy (attack, defend and intercept). Utility functions are used for estimating how well suited a robot is for a certain role. They are not onl...

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 includ...

SPQR + ISocRob is a joint team between two research groups: SPQR (Italy) and IsocRob (Portugal). SPQR (Soccer Player Quadruped Robots) is the group of the Faculty of Engineering at University of Rome “La Sapienza” in Italy, that is involved in RoboCup competitions since 1998 in different leagues (Middle-size 1998-2002, Four-legged since 2000, Real-rescue-robots since 2003, Virtual-rescue and @H...

In the RoboCup middle-sized soccer league, autonomous robot players in the field are required to localize themselves in real time by utilizing the sensors mounted on themselves. There could be many different kinds of sensors that can serve as part of the solution to this task. Especially, vision sensors are one of the most promising because they are small, light-weight, inexpensive, and the mos...

Robotic soccer is a challenging research area, which involves multiple agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives. Here we describe the Sharif CESR small robot team, which was participated in Robocup 2001 small size league in Seattle, USA. This paper explains the overall architecture of our robotic soccer system. Figure 1 shows a picture of our ...

This paper deals with a cooperative control method for a multi-agent system in dynamic environment. This method enables a robot to perform flexible cooperation based on the global evaluation of the achievement of objectives. Each robot communicates qualitative evaluation on the achievement level of each objective. Each robot calculates the global evaluation on the achievement of the team object...

One of the elementary tasks of an autonomous mobile robot is the execution of different behavior patterns in order to fulfill a given task. The complexity of this problem is especially high if the robot operates in a dynamic, unpredictable environment and requires the parallel control of multiple actuators. In this paper we present a novel architecture for robust and fast mobile robot control. ...

In robotic soccer a good ball position estimate is essential for successful play. Given the uncertainties in the perception of each individual robot, merging the local perceptions of the robots into a global ball estimate often results in a more reliable estimate and helps to increase team performance. Robots can use the global ball position even if they themselves do not see the ball or they c...