Building a Dedicated Robotic Soccer System

Robotic Soccer involves multiple agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve speci c objectives. We have been building an architecture that addresses this integration of high-level and low-level reasoning as a combined system of mini-robots, a camera for perception, a centralized interface computer, and several client servers as the minds of the mini-robot players. In this paper we focus on the hardware design of our mini-robots. Our main purpose is to provide a detailed description of our design decisions so that others may learn from and replicate our e orts. Communication between the interface computer and the mini-robots is achieved through coded infrared radiation. The minirobots can turn on the spot and move forward and backward with variable speed. Our design also allows a well-balanced use of the on-board power and current supplies.