The small league

The paper describes the VUB AI-Lab team competing in the small robots league of RoboCup '98 in Paris. The approach of this team targets for a longterm evolution of diierent robots, team-structures, and concepts. Therefore, the eeorts for the '98 participation focus providing a exible architecture, which forms a basis for this goal. In doing so, the development of the so-called RoboCube constitutes a milestone on this road. The RoboCube is an extremely compact robot controller providing quite some computation power, memory, various I/O interfaces , and radio communication. It facilitates the use of many sensors and eeectors, including their onboard processing, allowing to explore a large space of diierent robots and team setups. Accordingly, the '98 VUB AI-Lab team consists of heterogenous robots. The paper describes their important electromechanical features like drive units and potential shooting mechanisms. In addition, the radio communication, the basic control algorithms and the global vision system are described.