The Robotic Water Polo and Underwater Robot Cooperation Involved in the Game

Abstract

Multi-robot cooperation is a very important area in the field of robot. As we know, it is difficult to use a single robot to complete tasks independently. Often, people use multiple robots cooperation in order to compensate for the lack of individual ability. Multi-level robot can greatly improve the efficiency of the whole system. Compared to a single robot, a coordinated multi-robot system has many advantages : First, because of multi-robot systems’ distribution in space, resources and functions, multi-robot systems have higher efficiency and wider scope of the application than single robot; Second, because multi-robot systems have high redundancy, So multi-robot systems have more fault-tolerant capabilities and higher robust than single robot; Also compared with the design of a very powerful independent robot, construction of a number of robots which have simple structure and function will be economical, easy, flexible, and can greatly reduce the costs. Due to the advantages of the multi-robot systems, Multi-robot cooperation is drawing increasing attention to the people, a lot of researches on multi-robot coordination and centralization, Load distribution, motion planning and other issues have been done all over the world. By now, multi-robot cooperation achievements were mainly concentrated in the areas of robots on land, there has few achievements of underwater robot collaboration. The main reason is that the complexity and uncertainty of the underwater environment bring a lot of interference to the system, the efficiency and accuracy of the control are reduced to a large extent by these interfere. In addition, the underwater environment has a higher requirement that the robot should have a higher compressive strength, anti-jamming capabilities and more accurate and robust sensing system. In fact, along with the exploration of underwater resources, there are more and more underwater tasks, many underwater tasks need a number of robots to collaborate because of their high complexity. The research on underwater robot collaboration has become an urgent task. We propose a novel robotic soccer game called Robotic Water Polo(RWP) to promote the underwater robot technique and their combination, Fig.1 shows the filed of RWP, Similar to the popular robotic soccer games on land, the RWP is also designed as standard task for multiple swimming robots under a dynamic underwater environment. To play RWP, each team has three or two underwater robots, we called them robotic fish. They do their best to