Development of micro-robot system for playing soccer games

Abstract

This paper surveys recent trends in developing a micro-robot soccer system, and presents a design procedure for soccer-playing robots, focusing on our system based on the centralized approach. The robot soccer game has a lot of challenging problems, such as coordination between robots, motion planning of robots, visual recognition of objects, and so on. Considering the results of the MIROSOT contests, the centralized approach may be more powerful than the distributed approach in order to implement such functions. Our attempt was to develop a micro-robot system with a remote-brainless control architecture. After that, new techniques were applied to the chasis design, the actuators, the radio link, the vision system software, and the control strategy software. Using a fast vision system, we obtain the configuration of each robot, and then the host computer computes the desired motion and commands each robot directly via RF communication. We describe in detail some technical tips for developing the robots, and explain our strategy for obtaining the scores. This article also includes the most recent improvements in robot hardware and software.