Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction
RoboCup provides a standard test bed for the dissemination and validation of innovative theories, algorithms and agent architectures, which has promoted artificial intelligence and robotics for almost two decades (Kitano et al. , 1997). The final goal of RoboCup is that a team of fully autonomous humanoid soccer robots will beat the human World Cup champion team by 2050.
At present, RoboCup is made up of RoboCup Soccer (Simulation League, Small Size League, Middle Size League, Standard Platform League), RoboCup Rescue, RobotCup@Home, RoboCup Junior, etc. Different robots are designed for these competitions. The NAO robot developed by the French company Aldebaran-Robotics has been deployed in the RoboCup standard league (Gouaillier et al. , 2009). Researchers can build their software based on the Robot Operating System (ROS)[1] for NAO robots. Tracked robots are good at locomotion, which are developed to search and rescue in large-scale disasters for RoboCup Rescue (Kadous et al. , 2006). For RobotCup@Home, human-robot interaction and speech understanding are more important. Chen et al. (2013) developed the robot KeJia, which was based on a two-wheels driving chassis. And the software architecture of KeJia was based on ROS.
For the RoboCup Middle-Size League (MSL), all the robots can be designed freely as long as they stay below a maximum size and a maximum weight. And they are distributed and fully autonomous, which means all the robot sensors are on-board, and robots should be able to process the sensor information and realise decision, motion planning and control by themselves. Wireless communication can be used to help cooperation and coordination with teammates. As shown in Figure 1, the MSL game is highly competitive and dynamic, for example, on an 18- × 12-m field, velocities of up to 5 m/second are reached. Lots of research subjects are included in MSL, such as mechanical design, electric system design, visual perception, real-time reasoning, motion control and multi-robot cooperation.
Founded in 2004, our NuBot MSL team has been participating RoboCup actively since 2006 in Bremen, Germany. In this paper, we will share the whole design of our forth-generation NuBot robots, especially mechanical platform, electronic system and software based on ROS, which are made open source[2]. Therefore, others who want to participate in the RoboCup MSL can avoid some...