Proposal of a Kit-Style Robot as the New Standard Platform for the Four-Legged League

In 2006 the Sony Corporation announced that production of the Aibo robot, which is the standard robot platform of the four-legged league of RoboCup, would be discontinued. This paper describes a prototype robot kit which could lead to a new standard platform for the four-legged league. The aims for development of the new platform can be summarized as follows: 1.) Continue and improve the concepts behind the Sony Aibo robot. 2.) Allow research into sophisticated quadruped soccer skills. 3.) Build an open systems robot to advance low level features and to support high level strategy planning and learning. 4.) Achieve faster and more exciting soccer games. 5.) Contribute to progress of the four-legged league, which to date has been a very successful league. 6.) Determine kit style hardware for year to year upgrades of selected modules. The robot kit allows for substantial new flexibility in hardware design in associated scientific challenges and research projects. The present paper addresses two possible versions of the proposed kit: terrier and bear.