A Modified Potential Fields Method for Robot Navigation Applied to Dribbling in Robotic Soccer

Abstract

This paper describes a modified potential fields method for robot navigation, especially suited for unicycle-type non-holonomic mobile robots. The potential field is modified so as to enhance the relevance of obstacles in the direction of the robot motion. The relative weight assigned to front and side obstacles can be modified by the adjustment of one physically interpretable parameter. The resulting angular speed and linear acceleration of the robot can be expressed as functions of the linear speed, distance and relative orientation to the obstacles. For soccer robots, moving to a desired posture with and without the ball are relevant issues. To enable a soccer robot to dribble a ball, i.e., to move while avoiding obstacles and pushing the ball without losing it, under severe restrictions to ball holding capabilities, a further constraint among the angular speed, linear speed and linear acceleration is introduced. This dribbling behavior has been used successfully in the robots of the RoboCup Middle-Size League ISocRob team.

Multi-Robot Search and Rescue: A Potential Field Based Approach

“…We also intend to investigate the effect of the local group radius (both increasing and decreasing its size). Other possible future work includes, applying this work to a very large-scale robotic system (hundreds of robots) [18] and implementing the sharing robots in other common problems such as robotic soccer [7,12], formation control [16], the coverage problem [10] and hunting [3]. It is hoped the work in this paper can form a basis for future work on real robots.…”

“…Other approaches to potential fields include that of Reif et al [18] in which an individual agents motion is a result of an artificial force imposed by other agents and components of the system. Damas et al [7] modify potential fields to enhance the relevance of obstacles in the direction of the robots motion. Howard et al [10] divide their potential field into two components, a field due to obstacles and a field due to other robots.…”

“…We largely reproduce the problem description in section 2 from [2] for completeness. Although this is a specific problem instance, we believe our system may be applied to many other problems such as robotic soccer [7,12], the coverage problem [10] and robotic hunting [3].…”

Planning Trajectories in Dynamic Environments Using a Gradient Method

“…The work described in [8] presents an approach based on modified potential field. The method focuses on the generation of low level commands that enable the robot to dribble the ball amongst moving obstacle, but do not address the Our approach on the other hand, as already pointed out, generates navigation functions that does not contains local minima.…”

Dribbling Control of Omnidirectional Soccer Robots

“…With the analysis of the force exerted on the ball inspired by [8], we obtain a constraint of robot movement in the dribbling process for keeping a rolling ball. Under this constraint, the task of dribbling a ball to follow a given path is completed by approaching a reference point to the given path and steering the ball to move around this point simultaneously.…”