Yellow Jackets Legged Robot Soccer

At the BORG Lab we are investigating multiagent and multirobot systems by building real teams of mobile robots. In April/May 2003 we competed at American Open in Pittsburgh.


Faculty

Students

Our 2004 Robot Team

Our research interests in robot soccer include team coordination, cooperative sensing and communication. The focus this year was to create a team that could pass and cooperatively track the locations of opponents. Cooperative tracking is implemented but it hasn't yet been integrated with the soccer code. We are working on that from now until the 2004 US Open and RoboCup.

We did not want to re-invent such things as gaits and vision from scratch. We started our software development in January 2003 using CMU's code from the 2002 RoboCup. Their code includes very nice walking, vision, kicking, and sequencing software which we fully exploited. (Thank you CMU!). We have now completely re-written this code so that it is much more modular.

We developed new behavior sequences and revised some of the lower level behaviors to create a team that would position attackers in good locations to receive passes. The robots with the ball attempt to pass the ball to those locations when one of our players is there. In several cases we were successful in completing passes at the American Open. (see movie above). We also tweaked some of the lower level behaviors to improve them (e.g. dribbling) and we switched to 3 attackers (versus CMU's 2 attacker strategy).

RoboCup American Open 03

We travelled to Pittsburgh April 30th to May 4th to participate in the American Open. We competed with seven other legged robot teams from all over the Americas: Tecnologico de Monterrey Campus Estado de Mexico; CMU, Columbia/Rutgers/CUNY, Universidad de Chile, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Washington.

We finished first in our round-robin group, we advanced to the semi-finals, then the final. We met CMU in the final. This was a close, and very exciting game. Eventually CMU prevailed 2-0.


Maintained by Tucker Balch.