It is a challenging task for a team of multiple fast-moving robots to cooperate with each other and to compete with another team in a dynamic, real-time environment. For a robot team to play soccer successfully, various technologies have to be incorporated including robotic architecture, multi-agent collaboration and realtime reasoning. A robot is an integrated system, with a controller embedded in its plant. A robotic system is the coupling of a robot to its environment. Robotic systems are, in general, hybrid dynamic systems, consisting of continuous, discrete and event-driven components. Constraint Nets (CN) provide a semantic model for modeling hybrid dynamic systems. Controllers are embedded constraint solvers that solve constraints in realtime. A controller for our robot soccer team, UBC Dynamo98, has been modeled in CN, and implemented in Java, using the Java Beans architecture. A coach program using an evolutionary algorithm has also been designed and implemented to adjust the ...
Yu Zhang, Alan K. Mackworth