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Motion Planning for Soccer Playing Robots
Carlos
Ernesto Guestrin
Abstract
In this paper,
1. Introduction
This paper presents the foundations and results of the application of
potential fields for motion planning in soccer playing robots. The
figure bellow shows a typical configuration of a robot soccer environment.
This application environment has certain key characteristics, including:
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Very dynamic environment: the configuration of the robots and ball changes
constantly and rapidly in time. |
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Simple workspace: the workspace is simply composed of a few convex polygons
(the robots) and a circle (the ball). |
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Two degree of freedom actuation against three degree of freedom robots:
the robots are actuated through linear and angular velocity commands, while
their state is defined by three variables: two for position and one for
orientation. |
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High-dimension configuration space for the team: if motion planning is
performed for the team as a whole, the dimension of the configuration space
is high, three times the number of robots. |
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Continuos variables: the state of the world is defined by continuous variables. |
Based on these characteristics, the approach chosen has the following features:
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Plan for each robot individually: the low level planning is performed for
each individual robot of the team, based on the current state of the system
(configuration of all robots and the ball). |
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Use potential fields for motion planning: a set of potential fields will
be associated with each robot; the motion of the robot will be determined
by the resultant of these fields. |
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Work around the assumption of a very dynamic environment: a concern
about local minima, which is usually associated with potential fields,
is not very significant in this case, because the environment changes constantly,
thus, making local minima unlikely. |
This project was conducted as part of CS326a Motion Planning class
taught by Jean-Claude Latombe.
The RoboCup is an international competion for soccer playing robots.
Related work can be found at the RoboCup
website.
2. Objectives
3. Potential Fields
4. The Simulator
5. The Applet
Run the SoccerSimulator
applet. It uses Java 1.1, so you will need Netscape 4.5 or latter to
run it.
6. Results
7. Conclusions and Future
Work
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