Cup Soccer Tournament Research Articles

The importance of fast vision in winning the First Micro-Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament

Abstract This paper describes the Newton Labs entry in the 1996 MIROSOT Micro-Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament (http://www.mirosot.org), which won first place. Control of the three robot players is centralized; this requires relatively high bandwidth connections to the robots, as well as fast spatial information at the central controller. Spatial sensing is accomplished by use of the Cognachrome Vision Tracking System, which is capable of tracking the positions and orientations of several objects at the full NTSC frame rate of 60 Hz.

Designing distributed control architecture for cooperative multi-agent system and its real-time application to soccer robot

The soccer robot system consists of multi-agents, with highly coordinated operations and movements so as to fulfill specific objectives, even under adverse situations. The coordination of the multi-agent is associated with a lot of supplementary work in advance. The associated issues are the position correction, prevention of communication congestion, local information sensing in addition to the need for imitating the human-like decision making. A control structure for soccer robot is designed and several behaviors and actions for a soccer robot are proposed. The action selection mechanism (ASM) is proposed as a high-level controller and is applied to a one-on-one soccer game. The intervention module of ASM uses multilayer perceptrons and its effectiveness is shown by experimental results. Modified zone defense as a basic strategy and several special strategies for fouls as applied to SOTY and MIRO teams for MIROSOT are discussed. The authors have been placed in the second and fourth positions in MIROSOT'96 (Micro-Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament) held at KAIST in November 1996, with the proposed scheme and micro-robots.

Dynamic Object Capture Using Fast Vision Tracking

This article discusses the use of fast (60 frames per second) object tracking using the COGNACHROME VISION SYSTEM, produced by Newton Research Labs. The authors embedded the vision system in a small robot base to tie for first place in the Clean Up the Tennis Court event at the 1996 Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Of particular interest is that the authors' entry was the only robot capable of using a gripper to capture and pick up the motorized, randomly moving squiggle ball. Other examples of robotic systems using fast vision tracking are also presented, such as a robot arm capable of catching thrown objects and the soccer-playing robot team that won the 1996 Micro Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament in Taejon, Korea.