CMU Hammerheads 2001 Team Description

The CMUMultiRobot Lab focuses on the study of team behavior in dynamic and uncertain environments. In order to further this research, we have developed an inexpensive autonomous robot platform, the Minnow. The CMU Hammerhead robot soccer team competes in the middle-size RoboCup competition using four of these Minnow robots. The 2001 CMU Hammerheads represent the evolution of the previous year’s team [1], using largely the same hardware and software architecture. The major changes in hardware are increases in processor speed and memory, and a change to digital cameras. On the software side, most of the low-level behaviors from the 2000 team are retained, and the emphasis has been placed on refining high-level behaviors and improving coordination and teamwork. The challenges of robot soccer require the robot players both to be individually capable and also to work together with their teammates. Some of the research areas which have been furthered by our work in robot soccer include color vision, multiagent sensor fusion, cooperative behaviors, and communication in noisy low-bandwidth environments. This paper describes the hardware and software architecture of the Minnow platform used in the CMU Hammerhead robot soccer team. Section 2 describes the hardware components of the robot platform. The software and control architectures are presented in Section 3. Finally, our strategies for teamwork and coordination are presented in Section 4.