Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
{mmv,pstone,kwunh}@cs.cmu.edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/{"7E mmv,"7E pstone,"7E kwunh}
Submitted to Autonomous Agents '98, October 1997
Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain which involves
multiple agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment
to achieve specific objectives. In this paper, we describe CMUnited,
the team of small robotic agents that we developed to enter the
RoboCup-97 competition. We designed and built the robotic agents,
devised the appropriate vision algorithm, and developed and
implemented algorithms for strategic collaboration between the robots
in an uncertain and dynamic environment. The robots can organize
themselves in formations, hold specific roles, and pursue their
goals. In game situations, they have demonstrated their collaborative
behaviors on multiple occasions. The robots can also switch roles to
maximize the overall performance of the team. We present an overview
of the vision processing algorithm which successfully tracks multiple
moving objects and predicts trajectories. The paper then focusses on
the agent behaviors ranging from low-level individual behaviors to
coordinated, strategic team behaviors. CMUnited won the RoboCup-97
small-robot competition at IJCAI-97 in Nagoya, Japan.
Content Areas: autonomous robots; multi-agent teams; coordinating
perception, thought, and action; multi-agent communication, coordination,
and collaboration; real-time performance.