The main goal of the Union Esprit Basic Research Action is to develop methods for increasing the autonomy and intelligence of Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles (Rov). The project focuses mainly on the development of coordinated control and sensing strategies for combined manipulator and vehicle systems. Both fundamental theories and methods for the design of these heterogeneous systems are investigated and concern: dynamic modeling and control for arm/base stabilization, use of sensory information (camera, sonars, lasers..) for pipeline inspection, navigation, programming, etc. Experimental and simulated results validated the theoretical developments. A complex canonical mission in the eld of o shore Inspection Maintenance and Repair tasks was chosen to illustrate the integration of all the results. The Union project brings together seven European research groups working on underwater vehicles, robotics and intelligent sensing systems: (1)Ifremer, Subsea Robotics Laboratory (FR), (2) Inria, SophiaAntipolis, Icare Team (FR), (3) Lirmm-Cnrs, Robotics Laboratory (FR), (4) Upc, Polytechnical University Barcelona (S), (5)Lbm, Technical University Muenchen (D), (6)Hwu, Heriot Watt University (UK), (7) Oxford University (UK).

Abstract-In this paper we present a case study of cooperation of a strongly heterogeneous robot team, composed of a highly articulated humanoid robot and a wheeled robot with largely complementing and some competing capabilities. By combining two strongly heterogeneous robots the diversity of accomplishable tasks increases as the variety of sensors and actuators in the robot systems is extended compared with a team consisting of homogeneous robots. The scenario describes a tightly cooperative task, where the humanoid robot and the wheeled robot follow for a long distance a ball, which is kicked finally by the humanoid robot into a goal. The task can be fulfilled successfully by combining the abilities of both robots. For task distribution and allocation, a newly developed objective function is presented which is based on a proper modeling of the sensing, perception, motion and onboard computing capabilities of the cooperating robots. Aspects of reliability and fault tolerance are considered. I. INTROWith the growing importance of autonomous mobile robots in industrial and research applications the need to execute successfully challenging missions and tasks has also grown. To fulfill a large diversity of tasks with a sufficient reliability in the robot system, teams of robots are used instead of single highly specialized robots. The majority of research in robot teams considers homogeneous robots, most of them based on wheeled locomotion. The investigated tasks differ in the complexity of structure and cooperation, starting from basic tasks as foraging [1] or exploration of an area without a specific cooperation [2] up to problems with increase in communication and synchronization demands, e.g., cooperative box pushing [3] or cooperative surveillance of an area [4], [5] or soccer playing [6], [7], [8]. A classification of different stages of cooperation is given in [9]. A homogeneous robot team is usually equipped with identical sensors and actuators which usually differ only slightly, e.g., because of different wear and tear. Therefore, the diversity of tasks which can be accomplished by a homogeneous robot team is still quite limited. This drawback can be overcome by a team of heterogeneous robots, each or several of them equipped with different sensing, perception, motion and onboard computing capabilities. Several application have been investigated with robots, which differ only slightly in their capabilities. Although these robots are not fully identical, commonly they are still considered to form J. Kiener is with the Simulation,

Abstract-Many different and high-quality humanoid motions have been developed based on a tailored, 55cm tall humanoid robot kinematics and design using 21 servo motors and inertial sensors for stabilization. These include fast forward walking of about 1.5 km/h in permanent operation, multidirectional walking capabilities, a variety of standard and spectacular kicks, standing up motions as well as motions displaying an emotional state of the robot. While all robot motions are executed in real-time on a controller board an adaptive selection of different motions and autonomous robot behavior are controlled by hierarchical state machine executed on an onboard Pocket PC. Information about the current state of the dynamic environment in a soccer game is obtained from two directed cameras with wide and narrow angles. During RoboCup 2006 the robot demonstrated the fastest walking of all kid-and teen-size humanoid robots on regular terrain as well as in the rough terrain challenge. Also a large variety of different motions as well as individual and team behaviors during successful autonomous soccer games have been demonstrated including the scoring of a goal with the first autonomously performed backheel kick of a humanoid robot.

In this paper a case study of cooperation of a strongly heterogeneous autonomous robot team, composed of a highly articulated humanoid robot and a wheeled robot with largely complementing and some redundant abilities is presented. By combining strongly heterogeneous robots the diversity of achievable tasks increases as the variety of sensing and motion abilities of the robot system is extended compared to a usually considered team of homogeneous robots. A number of methodologies and technologies required to achieve the long-term goal of cooperation of heterogeneous autonomous robots are discussed including modeling tasks and robot abilities, task assignment and redistribution, robot behavior modeling and programming, robot middleware and robot simulation. Example solutions and their application to the cooperation of autonomous wheeled and humanoid robots are presented in this case study. The scenario describes a tightly coupled cooperative task, where the humanoid robot and the wheeled robot track a moving ball, which is to be approached and kicked by the humanoid robot into a goal. The task can be fulfilled successfully by combining the abilities of both robots.

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