Cooperative Multi-Agent Robotic Systems: From the Robot-soccer Perspective

With the ever increase in the number of robots in an industrial environment, scientists/technologists were often faced with issues on cooperation and coordination among diierent robots and their self governance in a work space. This has led to the developments in multi-robot cooperative autonomous systems. The proponents of multi-robot autonomous systems needed a model to test the theories being proposed to test its eecacy and eeciency. It is not a surprise that they started focussing on Robot soccer. Robot soccer makes heavy demands in all the key areas of robot technology, mechanics, sensors and intelligence. And it does so in a competitive setting that people around the world can understand and enjoy. The Micro Robot Wold Cup Soccer Tournament (MiroSot) was thus given birth, and a new interdis-ciplinary research area emerged, where scientists and technologists from diverse elds like, robotics, intelligent control, communication, computer technology, sensor technology, image processing, mechatronics, artii-cial life, etc., work together to make the multi-robot systems a reality. The robots used in MiroSot are small in size (7.5cm X 7.5cm X 7.5cm), fully/semi autonomous and without any human operators. MiroSot involves multiple robots that need to collaborate in an adversar-ial environment to achieve speciic objectives. In multi-robot systems the environment's dynamics can be determined by other robots in addition to the uncertainty that may be inherent in the domain. They have dynamic environments as other robots intentionally aaect the environment in unpredictable ways. The key aspect being the need for robots not only to control themselves, but also to track and control the ball which is a passive part of the environment. The interesting theoretical issue behind MiroSot experiments is the use of soccer as a prototype example of a complex, adaptive system. And let us inculcate sports robotship in our soccer robots.