Communicating among Robots in the RoboCup Middle-Size League

Abstract

Abstract. The RoboCup Middle-Size League robotic soccer competitions pose a real cooperation problem for teams of mobile autonomous robots. In the current state-of-practice cooperation is essential to overcome the opponent team and thus a wireless communication protocol and associated middleware are now fundamental components in the multirobots system architecture. Nevertheless, the wireless communication has relatively low reliability and limited bandwidth. Since it is shared by both teams, it is a fundamental resource that must be used parsimoniously. Curiously, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study on the effective use of the wireless medium in actual game situations was done. In this paper we show how current teams use the wireless medium and we propose a set of best practices towards a more efficient utilization. Then, we present a communication protocol and middleware that follow such best practices and have been successfully used by one particular MSL team in the past four years.

A distributed robotic vision service

“…Wireless communication between mobile robots or with networked services is vulnerable to channel contention which introduces latency even at moderate concurrency [7], and can make communication ineffective [8] or inefficient [9]. Contention can be mitigated by reducing total throughput and reducing the size of each message, by communicating more compact higher-level information.…”

“…Figure 10 shows the network traffic for the case of two cameras simultaneously streaming video in the ROS raw format, compared to DRVS messages alone. DRVS reduced the peak bandwidth from 1MBps to 10kBps, and the gaps in the traffic between DRVS messages allows other systems to use the same channel with less contention and subsequent re-transmission [8]. Compression can reduce the bandwidth of streamed video by more than an order of magnitude but the traffic remains continuous, without gaps which can be used for other communications on the This reduction in bandwidth is a significant result for robots with limited computational resources, as it demonstrates that DRVS enables multiview distributed vision with low computational overhead on the robot.…”

CAMBADA Soccer Team: from Robot Architecture to Multiagent Coordination

“…The change in the vector leads to a new agreement process similar to described above. More details about the communication process in the CAMBADA team, as well as in the MSL, can be found in (Almeida et al, 2004;Santos et al, 2009;.…”

“…The project started in 2003, coordinated by the Transverse Activity on Intelligent Robotics group of the Institute of Electronic and Telematic Engineering of Aveiro (IEETA). This project involves people working on several areas for building the mechanical structure of the robot, its hardware architecture and controllers (Almeida et al, 2002;Azevedo et al, 2007) and the software development in areas such as image analysis and processing (Caleiro et al, 2007;Cunha et al, 2007;Martins et al, 2008;Neves et al, 2007;, sensor and information fusion (Silva et al, 2008;, reasoning and control , cooperative sensing approach based on a Real-Time Database (Almeida et al, 2004), communications among robots (Santos et al, 2009; and the development of an efficient basestation. The main contribution of this chapter is to present the new advances in the areas described above involving the development of an MSL team of soccer robots, taking the example of the CAMBADA team that won the RoboCup 2008 and attained the third place in the last edition of the MSL tournament at RoboCup 2009.…”

Deterministic Ants in Labyrinth — Information Gained by Map Sharing

“…On the other hand, cooperation between robots is of interest for tens of years, with the ant colony optimization algorithm as a milestone [3]. More recent works are at the level of applications ( [4,5,6] to call only a few). In particular, cooperation between Search-and-Rescue (SAR) robots is of current interest [9,13].…”