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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.

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Author information

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.
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  2. Murilo Fernandes Martins
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  3. Flavio Tonidandel
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  4. Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to José Angelo Gurzoni Jr..

Additional information

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

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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.

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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

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Keywords

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