4-Legged Robocup

One of the ultimate dreams in robotics is to create life-like robotics systems, such as humanoid robots and animal-like legged robots. Sony believes that quadruped robots have major potential for future robotics, because the consumer market of personal entertainment robots has the potential to surpass the static industrial market. Also from AI point of view this personal robots are more interesting than industrial robots, because those robots have to be reasonably intelligent, maintain a certain level of agility, be aware of their environment and be able to engage in some collaborative behaviors with each other and humans. The RoboCup 4-Legged Soccer League is an ideal challenge for a general University, because it defines a standard hardware platform, which allows to excel on algorithms to perceive the environment, to reason about the optimal (joint) actions, and to perform those actions in smooth way. The main idea of this assignment is to start as general teammember of the Dutch Aibo Team to gain experience with the platform. After an initial phase, a more specialized thesis topic can be selected, like:
  • Simultaneously localization and modeling (e.g. [1])
  • Color-histogram-based object tracking (e.g. [2] and [3])
  • Joint action behavior (learn team behavior Attack / Intercept / Defend by combining individual behaviors [4])

Keywords:
 Robotics
Study:
 Artificial Intelligence
Contact: Arnoud Visser
Status:
 started by Jürgen Sturm in February 2004
Location:
 University of Amsterdam
References:
 [1] J.M. Porta and B.J.A. Kröse, 'Appearance-based concurrent map building and localization'. In F.C.A. Groen, editor, International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems, IAS'04, pages 1022-1029. IOS Press, March 2004.
[2] Z. Zivkovic and B. Kröse, 'An EM-like algorithm for color-histogram-based object tracking'. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 2004.
[3] C.A.M. Pieterse, 'Kleur invariantie voor de Robocup challenge - onderzoek naar een belichtings invariante methode voor object herkenning', June 2004, Bsc-thesis University of Amsterdam.
[4] M.T.J. Spaan and F.C.A. Groen, 'Team coordination among robotic soccer players'. In G. Kaminka, P.U. Lima, and R. Rojas, editors, RoboCup 2002, pages 356-363. Springer-Verlag, 2002.
Talks: