CMUNITED-98 Simulator Team

The CMUNITED-98 small-size robot team is a complete autonomous architecture composed of the physical robotic agents, a global vision-processing camera overlooking the playing field, and several clients as the minds of the small-size robot players. The global vision algorithm perceives the environment and processes the images, giving the positions of each robot and the ball. This information is sent to an off-board controller and distributed to the different agent algorithms. Each agent evaluates the world state and uses its strategic knowledge to make decisions. Actions are motion commands that are sent by the offboard controller through radio communication. Motion is not perfectly executed because of inherent mechanical inaccuracies and unforeseen interventions from other agents. This team competed in and won the 1998 RoboCup competition in Paris (Stone, Veloso, and Riley 1999; Kitano et al. 1997). This article gives an overview of the CMUNITED-98 robot team, focusing on improvements from the CMUNITED-97 team. These improvements include a robust low-level control algorithm, which handles a moving target with integrated obstacle avoidance, and active team collaboration at the strategic level. This article concludes with results from the RoboCup-98 competition. Hardware