Autonomous control of a humanoid soccer robot : development of tools and strategies using colour vision : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Mechatronics at Massey University

Humanoid robots research has been an ongoing area of development for researchers due to the benefits that humanoid robots present, whether for entertainment or industrial purposes because of their ability to move around in a human environment, mimic human movement and being aesthetically pleasing. The RoboCup is a competition designed to further the development of robotics, with the humanoid league being the forefront of the competition. A design for the robot platform to compete at an international level in the RoboCup competition will be developed. Along with the platform, tools are created to allow the robot to function autonomously, effectively and efficiently in this environment, primarily using colour vision as its main sensory input. By using a 'point and follow' approach to the robot control a simplistic A.I. was formed which enables the robot to complete the basic functionality of a striker of the ball. Mathematical models are then presented for the comparison of stereoscopic versus monoscopic vision, with the expansion on why monoscopic vision was chosen, due to the environment of the competition being known. A monoscopic depth perception mathematical model and algorithm is then developed, along with a ball trajectory algorithm to allow the robot to calculate a moving balls trajectory and react according to its motion path. Finally through analysis of the implementation of the constructed tools for the chosen platform, details on their effectiveness and their drawbacks are discussed

Flexible attention-based cognitive architecture for robots

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Robots have been working in factories to achieve tasks autonomously with little human intervention for some time. Even though robots are commonly found as vacuum cleaners in homes and assistants in hospitals, by comparison with factory robots, service robots have not been widely deployed in society because there remains several challenges deploying robots to achieve complex tasks in open, unstructured, uncontrolled and complex environments. Critical research gaps arise from the lack of cognitive architectures that support robots to undertake tasks in open and complex environments. Throughout the history of AI, researchers have developed various algorithms, representations and mechanisms, to solve specific tasks. However, each of these techniques has different strengths and weaknesses when applied to particular problems. A cognitive architecture provides a unifying infrastructure that can integrate various techniques to solve open and complex tasks. However, four important issues become apparent when current cognitive architectures are applied to service robotic tasks. First, they are not capable of managing robot resources and as a result robotic developers must take responsibility for managing the resources manually. Second, they are not capable of integrating independently developed techniques, which are often needed to solve problems. Third, they are inflexible, unable to adapt to design changes and require considerable time and effort to modify. Fourth, they are inadequate for supporting the necessary capabilities required by robots such as multiple goals, reliability and maintainability. These issues are confirmed when cognitive architectures are applied to a standard benchmark problem in AI: the autonomous robot soccer problem. The purpose of this dissertation is to address these significant gaps so as to accelerate the development, deployment and adoption of service robots undertaking tasks in open and complex environments. This dissertation develops a novel bio-inspired cognitive architecture (called ASMO) that has been designed and developed to address all four identified shortcomings of current cognitive architectures. In ASMO, intelligent behaviours to solve open and complex tasks is a result of the emergence of constituent processes, rather than from careful top-down control engineering. Minsky has argued in his Society of Mind that intelligent behaviours can emerge from the interaction of many simple processes, even though each process may lack `intelligence' in isolation. In addition, Anderson argued that an emergent system produces more complex behaviours and properties that cannot be reduced to the sum of its components. ASMO has attention, emotion and learning mechanisms that are inspired by human intelligence. It treats each action as a concurrent, independent and self-governed black box process that competes for the robot's attention to perform actions. The attention mechanism is used to mediate the competition among processes, which correspond to the set of potential actions. The emotion mechanism is used to bias the attention demanded by the processes. The learning mechanisms are used to modify the attention in order to improve robots' performances. Combining concurrent, independent and self-governed black-box processes with attention and emergent approaches allows ASMO to address the four shortcomings of current cognitive architectures. First, the attention mechanism manages resources explicitly. Second, the black-box design allows any kind of independently developed technique to be integrated without the need to know its internal algorithm, representation or mechanism. Third, attention weighted values enables various techniques to be (re)integrated or (re)structured on the fly with considerably less time and effort. Fourth, the concurrent, independent and self-governed designs support the capabilities required by robots by allowing processes to (i) achieve multiple goals concurrently, (ii) fail without causing the whole system to fail and (iii) be maintained in isolation. ASMO is evaluated using two robotic problems: (i) the RoboCup soccer standard benchmark problem is used to demonstrate proof-of-concept that a team of robots can be supported by ASMO. In particular, a real robot can be governed by ASMO's attention mechanism to undertake complex tasks. (ii) a companion robot problem is used to demonstrate that ASMO's attention, emotion and learning mechanisms overcome the four identified shortcomings of current state-of-the-art cognitive architectures. This dissertation presents ASMO, an innovative cognitive architecture that addresses the four shortcomings of current state-of-the-art cognitive architectures, and that can also accelerate the development, deployment and adoption of service robots. ASMO provides a more natural and easier approach to programming robots based on a novel bio-inspired attention management system. ASMO allows researchers and robot system developers to focus on developing new capabilities as processes rather than having to be concerned about integrating new capabilities into a cognitive architecture

Cognitive robotics in a soccer game domain: a proposal for the e-league competition

In this work, we will discuss the design of a team of robots to play soccer at RoboCup E-League. This task is being carried out in the Cognitive Robotics group of the Laboratory of Research and Development in Artificial Intellgence (LIDIA), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Universidad Nacional del Sur. The RoboCup competition provides a great opportunity to develop a multi-agent system in which we can test and apply new ideas and results. In the following sections, we will briefly describe the league in which we will participate, and our proposal for the implementation of a team.Eje: Inteligencia artificial distribuida, aspectos teóricos de la inteligencia artificial y teoría de computaciónRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Cognitive robotics in a soccer game domain: a proposal for the e-league competition

In this work, we will discuss the design of a team of robots to play soccer at RoboCup E-League. This task is being carried out in the Cognitive Robotics group of the Laboratory of Research and Development in Artificial Intellgence (LIDIA), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Universidad Nacional del Sur. The RoboCup competition provides a great opportunity to develop a multi-agent system in which we can test and apply new ideas and results. In the following sections, we will briefly describe the league in which we will participate, and our proposal for the implementation of a team.Eje: Inteligencia artificial distribuida, aspectos teóricos de la inteligencia artificial y teoría de computaciónRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Protosymbols that integrate recognition and response

We explore two controversial hypotheses through robotic implementation: (1) Processes involved in recognition and response are tightly coupled both in their operation and epigenesis; and (2) processes involved in symbol emergence should respect the integrity of recognition and response while exploiting the periodicity of biological motion. To that end, this paper proposes a method of recognizing and generating motion patterns based on nonlinear principal component neural networks that are constrained to model both periodic and transitional movements. The method is evaluated by an examination of its ability to segment and generalize different kinds of soccer playing activity during a RoboCup match

Designing an agent system for controlling a robotic soccer team

Robotic soccer is a way of putting different developments in intelligent agents into practice, including not only problems such as multi-agent planning and coordination, but also physical problems related to vision and communication subsystems. Because these problems cannot be all taken into account beforehand, the system must be designed to be robust enough to recover from any eventualities. In this work, we present the design used as the basis for an agents system implemented for the control of a team of robots for the E-League competition in RoboCup 2004. The implementation of the system was carried out following a layered design, with the objective of having a set of Service Layers, each of which is associated with a different level of abstraction. This layered design allows to construct a functional system with basic services that can be tested and refined progressively. The layers that are proposed as a basis for the arquitecture of a robotic soccer team offer a modular design, allowing the possibility of reuse in other robotic soccer leagues. Finally, the agents are implemented using the prolog language; the three uppermost layers in the hierarchy offer interfaces designed explicitly for this language.Eje: V - Workshop de agentes y sistemas inteligentesRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Processing interaction protocols in parallel: a logic programming implementation for robotic soccer

In this paper we explore different situations in which collaborative agents have to communicate among themselves using standard interaction protocols. We will propose how to process these interactions in parallel without interfering with other agent's activities. Thus, agents will not have to interrupt or delay an activity for handling incoming messages, and in some cases, answers can be created and delivered immediately. Our proposal will be oriented to a robotic soccer domain with autonomous mobile robots. We will analyze three kinds of situations in which the interaction between agents plays an important role for coordination: requirements, queries and proposals. Requirements arise when an agent asks another to execute a specific action. A query is used when an agent wants to acquire certain information from another agent. Finally, proposals arise when an agent wants to synchronize with another agent for collaboration. In a realistic scenario, an agent may interact with several agents and these interactions usually proceed simultaneously with the rest of the activities of the agent. Therefore, our proposal is to process these in- teractions in parallel with the decision cycle of the agent reducing the overhead imposed by the interaction. The implementation of this approach will be done in an extended logic programming framework developed for implementing multi-agent systems.Facultad de Informátic