Control and monitoring of a robotic soccer team: The base station application

Abstract

In robotic soccer, teams of autonomous robots play soccer according to rules similar to the official FIFA rules. The game is refereed by a human and his orders are communicated to the teams using an application called "Referee Box". No human interference is allowed during the games except for removing malfunctioning robots and re-entering robots in the game. The base station, a software application as described in this paper, has a determinant role during the development of a robotic soccer team and also during a game. This application must control the agents interpreting and sending high level instructions, like Start or Stop, and monitor information of the robots, for example the position and velocity, allowing easily to attest the feasibility of the robots behavior. This paper discusses the importance of the control and monitoring of a robotic soccer team, presenting the main challenges and the approaches that were used by the CAMBADA team in the conception of the base station application. As far as we know, no previous work has been published about the study of these important problems and the discussion of an efficient architecture to a base station application. The results obtained by the team confirms the good performance of this software, both during the games and in the development of the team. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.