Participation at RoboCup'98: The World Champions in Robotic Soccer

Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain that can be used to explore new problems and to demonstrate new techniques. We participated in RoboCup'98 in order to explore the problems of cooperation in multirobot -systems and to demonstrate our self-localization techniques based on laser range finders. In this paper we sketch the main technical points of our team, give a description of the process of developing our team before and during the competition, and describe how we viewed the competition in general. 1 Robotic Soccer: A Scientific Challenge Developing a team of soccer playing robots has been proposed by Mackworth [9] as a challenge for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. It requires to solve problems in the design of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, robotics, sensor fusion and more. In addition, it is necessary to integrate the solutions in order to build an autonomous soccer playing robot. For these reasons, robotic..