Techniques developed in the fields of evolutionary computation, adaptive systems, agents, and artificial neural networks can be used in entertainment robotics in order to provide easy access to the robot technology. We have developed a number of user-guided approaches based on the techniques from these research fields. These techniques include user-guided behaviour-based systems, user-guided ev...

In this paper we present the robot programming and planning language Readylog, a Golog dialect which was developed to support the decision making of robots acting in dynamic real-time domains like robotic soccer. The formal framework of Readylog, which is based on the situation calculus, features imperative control structures like loops and procedures, allows for decision-theoretic planning, an...

Reactive deliberation is a novel robot architecture that has been designed to overcome some of the problems posed by dynamic robot environments. It is argued that the problem of action selection in nontrivial domains cannot be intelligently resolved without attention to detailed planning. Experimental evidence is provided that the goals and actions of a robot must be evaluated at a rate commens...

This paper describes our stereo vision method which is combining an omnidirectional and a perspective camera. It was developed for our robot soccer team 1. RFC Stuttgart, which attends RoboCup competitions every year. The common approach to stereovision leads to high deviations from the real positions when it is not possible to synchronize the cameras for tracking moving objects and when the or...

The aim of this paper is to propose a robot referee for robot soccer. This idea is implemented using a service robot that moves along one of the field sides, uses its own cameras to analyze the game, and communicates its decisions to the human spectators using speech, and to the robot players using wireless communication. The robot uses a video-based game analysis toolbox that is able to analyz...

Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain that can be used to explore new problems and to demonstrate new techniques. We participated in RoboCup'98 in order to explore the problems of cooperation in multi-robot-systems and to demonstrate our self-localization techniques based on laser range nders. In this paper we sketch the main technical points of our team, give a description of the pro...

Due to limited availability of humanoid robots and the high costs involved, multi-agent experiments with humanoid robots have been at least difficult so far. With the introduction of RoboSapien, a low-cost humanoid robot developed for the toy market, this situation has changed. This paper describes how we augmented multiple RoboSapiens to obtain a team of soccer playing humanoid robots. We adde...

This paper proposes a new selection mechanism in evolutionary algorithm for fuzzy systems that can be applied to robot learning of shooting ability in robot soccer. In generic evolutionary algorithms, evaluation and selection are performed on the chromosome level, where a selected chromosome may include non-effective or bad genes. This may lead to an increase in the uncertainty of the solutions...

In spite of the great success of the fully autonomous distributed AIBO robot soccer league, a standing challenge is the creation of an effective planned, rather than emergent, coordinated two-robot attack, where one robot is the main attacker and goes to the ball and the other robot “supports the attack.” While the main attacker has its navigation conceptually driven by following the ball and a...

Modern robot soccer control architectures tend to separate higher level tactics and lower level navigation control. This can lead to tactics which do not fully utilize the robot’s dynamic actuation abilities. It can furthermore create the problem of the navigational code breaking the constraints of the higher level tactical goals when avoiding obstacles. We aim to improve such control architect...