The soul of a new machine: the soccer robot team of the FU Berlin

Abstract

This paper describes the hardware and software of the robotic soccer team built at the Freie Universität Berlin which took part in the 1999 RoboCup Championship in Stockholm, Sweden. Our team, the FUFighters, consists of five robots of less than 18 cm horizontal cross-section. Four of the robots have the same mechanical design, while the goalie is slightly different. All the hardware was designed and assembled at the FU Berlin. The paper describes the hierarchical control architecture used to generate the behavior of individual agents and the whole team. Our reactive approach is based on the dual dynamics framework proposed by Jäger, but extended with a third module of sensor readings. Fast changing sensors are aggregated in time to form slowly changing percepts in a temporal resolution hierarchy. We describe the main blocks of the software and their interactions.