Research representative: Prof. HASEGAWA, Tsutomu
(Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering)

  The RoboCup is a standard problem for robotics and artificial intelligence and it needs overall technical abilities for various fields. That's also a challenging research theme. Therefore we decided to participate in RoboCup Middle-size (50cm x 50cm) robot league, because the league involves most extensive technical problems such as mechanism of mobile robot, image processing, cooperative motion control, etc. By participating RoboCup, we mainly study a problem of "Efficient and Robust Planning in Dynamic Environment".

 We have newly developed soccer robots. For quick motion, the robots are made with powered wheel type (two independently driven wheels type), and are made with light weight as much as possible. Each robot has an omni-directional camera system, a kicking device and a communication system.

 For wide scope sensing, we use an omni-directional camera system. The omni-directional camera is composed of a CCD camera and a hyperboloidal omni-directional mirror, in which the camera optical axis is in line with the vertical axis of the mirror. This camera system is used for self-localization and recognition of ball, goal and other robots.

 The robot has a kicking device which is consists of an air cylinder, an electro-magnetic valve, and an air tank. This enables powerful action of shooting and passing.

 The Communication among field-player robots is important for cooperation movement such as passing, post-playing and positioning. To communicate with other robots, all robots of our team are equipped with wireless LAN cards.

 We use Linux as an operating system. Our robots recognize situations (ball and other robots) by vision system and then communicate with other robots about the information of the field. Each robot determines its action according to the information of the field, and negotiate with other robots.

Fig.1 Soccer robot          
Weight: 10.0 kg     
Maximum speed: 2.0m/sec
Fig.2 View of omni-directional camera