Brett Bussell, Haochen Gao, Casper Max, Nithin Raghavan, Trevor Voth
RoboCup is an annual robotics soccer tournament that aims to push the limits of robotics. "Building a robot that plays soccer will not by itself generate significant social and economic impact, but the accomplishment will certainly be considered a major achievement for the field. We call this kind of project a landmark project. RoboCup is a landmark project as well as a standard problem" - www.robocup.org/
Recent advances in the fields of path planning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision have opened up the possibility for far more accurate autonomous algorithms in an industrial sense. In the spirit of exploring how the intersections of these fields leads to new insight, we look to the game of soccer, where teams of robots collaborate to accomplish an objective (scoring a goal) while constrained by an adversary (the opposing team). In order to accomplish this, the robots must perceive their dynamic environment, develop a strategy to obtain an optimal benefit, and then perform an action. Constraints that have to be measured include how to balance speed and agility with more kinetically-optimal path-planning algorithms and coordination. By doing this, we hope to engender new insight as to how these fields interact and converge, measure how well algorithms within these fields can be implemented in the context of ROS and other robotic simulators, and observe how effective modern-day AI pipelines can work in simulation. The end goal of our project is therefore to have two teams of two robots (one offensive and one defensive) compete against one another. Because our simulation provides perfect knowledge of the world, we'll narrow our focus to exploring various methods of control, path planning, and overall strategy.
While the function of our robots is soccer, only their strategy is specific to this project. By rewriting their purpose, a swarm of robots with real time path planning and object avoidance can be applied to a limitless amount of scenarios, from transporting goods in a warehouse to search and rescue in dangerous environments.