Patrick Heinemann

Cooperative Multi-robot Soccer in a Highly Dynamic Environment Patrick Heinemann

The number of robots applied to different jobs in our society has steadily increased over the past years. While industrial robots welding and varnishing our cars are quite common these days, the future generation of robots will enter our everyday life. In contrast to industrial robots working in special evacuated areas for security reasons, these mobile service robots will have to move among and interact with humans, imposing new challenges on the software of the robots. Only the application of sensors to observe the environment and the subsequent use of intelligent data processing algorithms will enable the robots to avoid collisions with moving obstacles, to get information on their current locations, to perform goal oriented tasks and to cooperate with humans as well as other robots. This thesis addresses these new challenges by describing the development of a team of robots that is able to exhibit intelligent behavior, competitive as well as cooperative, while moving in a highly dynamic environment, as a first step towards a new kind of mobile robots. To evaluate and compare the results of the development, robotic soccer (RoboCup) was chosen as testbed for the robot team. Many of the challenges imposed by the RoboCup environment are similar to those found in real-life applications. Robots in RoboCup have to localize themselves, gather information on their environment, including the position and also the velocity of potential obstacles, deal with varying lighting scenarios, as well as competing and cooperating with other robots. Firstly, the thesis presents the decisions made concerning the co-design of the robot hardware and software. Here, the selection of an omni-directional drive mechanism and a vision sensor with a high frame rate, the software framework designed to be flexible and expandable, as well as the development of a common and simple control interface are the key points in the system design. T