This paper presents a vision system for robotic soccer which was tested on Sony’s four legged robot Aibo. The input for the vision system are images of the camera and the sensor readings of the robot’s head joints, the output are the positions of all recognized objects in relation to the robot. The object recognition is based on the colors of the objects and uses a color look-up table. The visi...

From 2008 on, the RoboCup competitions are going to host four distinct humanoid robot soccer leagues: the Standard Platform League (using the Nao robot of Aldebaran Robotics), the KidSize League (custom robots smaller than 60cm), the 3D Soccer Simulation League, and the TeenSize League (custom robots larger than 100cm). Currently, each of these leagues defines their own rule framework and resea...

A real-time hybrid control architecture for biped humanoid robots is proposed. The architecture is modular and hierarchical. The main robot’s functionalities are organized in four parallel modules: perception, actuation, world-modeling, and hybrid control. Hybrid control is divided in three behavior-based hierarchical layers: the planning layer, the deliberative layer, and the reactive layer, w...

Robot soccer competition provides an excellent opportunity for robotics research. In particular, robot players in a soccer game must perform real-time visual recognition, navigate in a dynamic field, track moving objects, collaborate with teammates, and hit the ball in the correct direction. All these tasks demand robots that are autonomous (sensing, thinking, and acting as independent creature...

The Petri Net Plans framework (PNPs [2]) allows the representation of high level programs for robotic behavior, providing all the action features needed to describe complex plans in dynamic, partially observable and unpredictable environments. The multi-robot extension of PNPs allows the synchronization of actions among different robots, the performance of deliberate cooperation and the coopera...

ion step is not amenable to formal proof. However, it is possible to validate a specification by proving challenging theorems concerning properties that the specification is expected to exhibit. If correct, these theorems reinforce the specifier’s understanding of the specification and its relationship with the underlying Problem Domain. If not, the specification probably needs to be changed to...

With the wide availability, high information content, and suitability for human environments of low-cost color cameras, machine vision is an appealing sensor for many robot platforms. For researchers interested in autonomous robot teams operating in highly dynamic environments performing complex tasks, such as robot soccer, fast colorbased object recognition is very desirable. Indeed, there are...

In RoboCup-98, sparrows team worked hard just to get both a simulation and a middle size robot team to work and to successfully participate in a major tournament. For this year, we were in a better position to start some more serious research work. Aside of improvements in the robot hardware and an extension of the vision processing capabilities, we implemented a more complete version of our so...

Many different and high-quality humanoid motions have been developed based on a tailored, 55cm tall humanoid robot kinematics and design using 21 servo motors and inertial sensors for stabilization. These include fast forward walking of about 1.5 km/h in permanent operation, multidirectional walking capabilities, a variety of standard and spectacular kicks, standing up motions as well as motion...