Page 208 - Innovations in Intelligent Machines

Evolutionary Design of a Control Architecture
for Soccer-Playing Robots

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Steffen Pr¨uter , Hagen Burchardt , and Ralf Salomon 1
1
Institute of Applied Microelectronics and Computer Engineering
University of Rostock
18051 Rostock, Germany
{steffen.prueter, hagen.burchardt, ralf.salomon}@uni-rostock.de

Abstract. Soccer-playing robots provide a good environment for the application of
evolutionary algorithms. Among other problems, slipping wheels, changing friction
values, and real-world noise are significant problems to be considered. This chapter
demonstrates how artificial intelligence techniques such as Kohonen maps, genetic
algorithms, and evolutionary-evolved neural networks, can compensate those effects.
As soccer robots are physical entities, all adaptation algorithms have to meet real-
time constraints.

1 Introduction

The Robot World Cup Initiative (RoboCup) [1] is an international project to
advance research on mobile robots and artificial intelligence (AI). The long-
time goal is to create a humanoid robot soccer team that is able to compete
against the human world-champion team by 2050. RoboCup consists of the
following three different fields. RoboCup Junior focuses on teaching children
and beginners on how to build and operate simple robots. The RoboCup
Rescue section works on robots for disaster and other hostile environments.
And RoboCup Soccer is on robot teams that play soccer against each other
in different leagues.
RoboCup Soccer itself is further divided into five different leagues, each
having its own rules, goals, and robot designs. The simulation league con-
siders only teams of simulated robots. The four-legged league, by contrast,
only Sony’s physical AIBO robot dogs play each other. Both the small-size
and the middle size league focus on self made robots with varying degrees
of complexities and capabilities. Finally, the humanoid league is about two-
legged robots that behave in a human-like fashion. The division into different
fields and leagues allows virtually every research team to participate in and
to contribute to the RoboCup initiative within its given financial and human
resource limits.

S. Pr¨uter et al.: Evolutionary Design of a Control Architecture for Soccer-Playing Robots,
Studies in Computational Intelligence (SCI) 70, 201–222 (2007)
www.springerlink.com c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007