Skip to main content
Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society
Download PDF

On the construction of a RoboCup small size league team

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 17, pages 69–82 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

The Robot Soccer domain has become an important artificial intelligence test bench and a widely studied research area. It is a domain with real, dynamic, and uncertain environment, where teams of robots cooperate and face adversarial competition. To build a RoboCup Small Size League (SSL) team able to compete in the world championship requires multidisciplinary research in fields like robotic hardware development, machine learning, multi-robot systems, computer vision, control theory, and mechanics, among others.

This paper intends to provide insights about the aspects involved on the development of the RoboFEI RoboCup SSL robot soccer team and to present the contributions produced over its course. Among these contributions, a computer vision system employing an artificial neural network (ANN) to recognize colors, a heuristic algorithm to recognize partially detected objects, an implementation of the known rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT) path planning algorithm with additional rules, enabling the angle of approach of the robot to be controlled, and a layered strategy software system.

Experimental results on real robots demonstrate the high performance of the vision system and the efficiency of the RRT algorithm implementation. Some strategy functions are also experimented, with empirical results showing their effectiveness.

References

  1. Arkin RC (1987) Motor schema based navigation for a mobile robot: An approach to programming by behavior. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), March, vol 4, pp 264–271

    Google Scholar 

  2. Atramentov A, LaValle SM (2002) Efficient nearest neighbor searching for motion planning. In: IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), pp 632–637

    Google Scholar 

  3. Balch T (2000) Teambots 2.0 documentation. www.teambots.org

  4. Balch T, Ram A (1998) Integrating robotic technologies with JavaBots. In: Working notes of the AAAI 1998 spring symposium, Stanford, CA.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bowling M, Browning B, Veloso M (2004) Plays as effective multiagent plans enabling opponent-adaptive play selection. In: Proceedings of international conference on automated planning and scheduling (ICAPS’04), pp 376–383

    Google Scholar 

  6. Browning B, Tryzelaar E (2003) Ubersim: A realistic simulation engine for robot soccer. In: Proceedings of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (AAMAS), Australia

    Google Scholar 

  7. Browning B, Bruce J, Bowling M, Veloso M (2005) Stp: Skills, tactics and plays for multi-robot control in adversarial environments. IEEE J Control Syst Eng 219:33–52

    Google Scholar 

  8. Bruce J, Veloso M (2002) Real-time randomized path planning for robot navigation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems (IROS)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Bruce J, Veloso M (2003) Fast and accurate vision-based pattern detection and identification. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), Taiwan, May, pp 1277–1282

    Google Scholar 

  10. Bruce J, Balch T, Veloso M (2000) Fast and inexpensive color image segmentation for interactive robots. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems (IROS), October, vol 3, pp 2061–2066

    Google Scholar 

  11. Bruce J, Zickler S, Licitra M, Veloso M (2008) Cmdragons: Dynamic passing and strategy on a champion robot soccer team. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), Pasadena, CA, pp 4074–4079

    Google Scholar 

  12. Cheng P, LaValle SM (2002) Resolution complete rapidly-exploring random trees. In: IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), pp 267–272

    Google Scholar 

  13. Foley JD, van Dam A, Feiner SK, Hughes JF (1995) Computer graphics: Principles and practice in C, 2nd edn. Addison-Wesley, Reading

    Google Scholar 

  14. Gurzoni JA Jr., Martins MF, Tonidandel F, Bianchi RAC (2009) A neural approach to real time colour recognition in the robot soccer domain. In: Proceedings of SBAI’09, The X Brazilian symposium of artificial intelligence

    Google Scholar 

  15. Huntsberger TL, Trebi-ollennu A, Aghazarian H, Schenker PS, Pirjanian P (2004) Distributed control of multi-robot systems engaged in tightly coupled tasks. Auton Robots 17:79–92

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Iocchi L, Matsubara H, Weitzenfeld A, Zhou C (eds) (2009) RoboCup 2008: Robot soccer world cup XII [papers from the 12th annual RoboCup international symposium, Suzhou, China, July 15–18, 2008]. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 5399. Springer, Berlin

    Google Scholar 

  17. Kitano H, Asada M, Kuniyoshi Y, Noda I, Osawa E (1997) Robocup: The robot world cup initiative. In: AGENTS ’97: Proceedings of the first international conference on autonomous agents. ACM, New York, pp 340–347

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  18. Kitano H, Asada M, Kuniyoshi Y, Noda I, Osawa E (1997) Robocup: A challenge problem for AI. AI Mag 18(1):73–85

    Google Scholar 

  19. Kitano H, Tambe M, Stone P, Veloso MM, Coradeschi S, Osawa E, Matsubara H, Noda I, Asada M (1997) The robocup synthetic agent challenge 97. In: International joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI), pp 24–30

    Google Scholar 

  20. Kramer J, Scheutz M (2007) Development environments for autonomous mobile robots: A survey. Auton Robots 22(2):101–132

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Latombe JC (1991) Robot motion planning. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht

    Book  Google Scholar 

  22. Laue T (2009) B-Smart (Bremen Small Multi-Agent Robot Team) team description for robocup 2009. In: Proceedings of the international RoboCup symposium 2009 (RoboCup 2009), June 30–July 3

    Google Scholar 

  23. Laue T, Spiess K, Rofer T (2006) Simrobot—a general physical robot simulator and its application in robocup. In: Bredenfeld A, Jacoff A, Noda I, Takahashi Y (eds) RoboCup 2005: Robot soccer world cup IX. Springer, Berlin, pp 173–183

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  24. LaValle SM (1998) Rapidly-exploring random trees: A new tool for path planning. Technical report, Iowa State University, October

  25. LaValle SM, Branicky MS (2003) On the relationship between classical grid search and probabilistic roadmaps. In: Algorithmic foundations of robotics V, vol 7. Springer, Berlin, pp 59–76

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  26. Martins MF, Tonidandel F, Bianchi RAC (2007) Towards model-based vision systems for robot soccer teams. In: Lima P (ed) Robotic soccer, Chap. 5. I-Tech Education and Publishing, pp 95–108

  27. Mataric MJ (2001) Learning in behavior-based multi-robot systems: Policies, models, and other agents. In: Cognitive systems research, April, pp 81–93

    Google Scholar 

  28. Mills JK, Ing JGL (1996) Dynamic modeling and control of a multi-robot system for assembly of flexible payloads with applications to automotive body assembly. J Robot Syst 13(12):817–836

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Mitchell TM (1997) Machine learning (ISE Editions). McGraw-Hill Education, New York

    Google Scholar 

  30. Nouyan S, Gross R, Dorigo M, Bonani M, Mondada F (2005) Group transport along a robot chain in a self-organised robot colony. In: Proceedings of the 9th int conf on intelligent autonomous systems. IOS Press, Amsterdam, pp 433–442

    Google Scholar 

  31. RoboCup Federation (2010) Laws of the Small Size League 2010

  32. Rojas R, Förster AG (2006) Holonomic control of a robot with an omnidirectional drive. Künstl Intell 20(2):12–17

    Google Scholar 

  33. Simões AS, Reali Costa AH (2000) Using neural color classification in robotic soccer domain. In: International joint conference IBERAMIA’00 Ibero-American conference on artificial intelligence and SBIA’00 Brazilian symposium on artificial intelligence, pp 208–213

    Google Scholar 

  34. Sridharan M, Stone P (2007) Color learning on a mobile robot: Towards full autonomy under changing illumination. In: Veloso MM (ed) International joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI), pp 2212–2217

    Google Scholar 

  35. Srisabye J, Wasuntapichaikul P, Onman C, Sukvichai K, Damyot S, Munintarawong T, Phuangjaisri P, Tipsuwan Y (2009) Skuba 2009 extended team description. In: Proceedings of the international RoboCup symposium 2009 (RoboCup 2009), June 30–July 3.

    Google Scholar 

  36. Stone P, Veloso M (1999) Task decomposition, dynamic role assignment, and low-bandwidth communication for real-time strategic teamwork. Artif Intell 110(2):241–273

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Sun D, Mills JK (2002) Adaptive synchronized control for coordination of multirobot assembly tasks. IEEE Trans Robot Autom 18:498–510

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Tambe M (1998) Implementing agent teams in dynamic multiagent environments. Appl Artif Intell 12(2–3):189–210

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Tao W, Jin H, Zhang Y (2007) Color image segmentation based on mean shift and normalized cuts. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern, Part B, Cybern 37(5):1382–1389

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Visser U, Ribeiro F, Ohashi T, Dellaert F (eds) (2008) RoboCup 2007: Robot soccer world cup XI, July 9–10, 2007, Atlanta, GA, USA. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 5001. Springer, Berlin

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Centro Universitario da FEI, Av. Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, 3972, 09850-901, Sao Bernardo do Campo, SP, Brazil

    José Angelo Gurzoni Jr., Flavio Tonidandel & Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi

  2. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Murilo Fernandes Martins

Authors
  1. José Angelo Gurzoni Jr.
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Murilo Fernandes Martins
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Flavio Tonidandel
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to José Angelo Gurzoni Jr..

Additional information

Murilo Fernandes Martins thanks the support of CAPES through the grant 5031/06-0.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Gurzoni, J.A., Martins, M.F., Tonidandel, F. et al. On the construction of a RoboCup small size league team. J Braz Comput Soc 17, 69–82 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13173-011-0028-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13173-011-0028-4

Keywords

  • Robotic soccer
  • Computer vision
  • Neural networks
  • RRT path planning
  • Omnidirectional control