McGill Robot Competition Team

Red Dogs.
From the McGill
Centre for Intelligent Machines

McGill now has a team competing in the

World Robot Soccer Initiative (RoboCup '99)

in the legged robot league.
Scroll down for status reports

This effort is being carried out within the Mobile Robotics Laboratory, The Ambulatory Robotics Laboratory, and the Shared Reality Lab within the Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM). The students and faculty involved come from the Facilties of Science and of Engineering in the Departments of Computer Science (1 faculty, 5 students), Electrical Engineering (1 faculty, 2 students) and Mechanical Engineering (1 faculty, 2 students). Other sponsors include Sony Corp., PRECARN Associates, and (indirectly) the National Science and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC). We are very grateful to all of them.

Information on McGill's past winning entries in the AAAI mobile robotics competition is also available.

As a hardware platform, we are using the Sony Robot Dog, generously provided by Sony after a competetive application process.

The idea of the legged robot competiton is to have several teams of walking robots play soccer against one another. All of the robots are fully autonomous -- that is automated robots -- and no remote control of any kind is permitted. Each team is composed of four robot 'dogs'. Typically, one of these will act as a goal keeper, although that is a strategic decision up to the partiular team (in a past such competition, some teams chose not to have goalies).

The robots themselves embody very impressive technology and are quite unlike anything else so widely available. The software most teams are using is as sophisticated as anything you'll find outside a major research lab. Different teams often focus of different aspects of the problem, such as seeing the soccer field of interacting with the other robots intelligently.

What

The team draws on expertise in 3 primary research areas:
vision and sensor-based robotics, multi-agent collaborative systems and
legged locomotion. Our work for RoboCup includes vision-based localization,
improved and alternative walking behaviours, and variable team interactions
and role switching. As a team new to the Sony robot, we are also
investing substantial energy in infrastructure.

Who

The student participants include

Shawn Arseneau,

Francois Belair,

Scott Burlington,

Haig Hugo Vrej Djambazian,

Andrew Ladd,

Guillaume Marceau,

Sami Obaid,

Didier Papadopoulos,

Richard Unger.

The faculty participants are

Martin Buehler (ME),
Jeremy Cooperstock (EE) and
Gregory Dudek (CS).

Technical comments

Download a technical description of our approach in postscript.

The McGill's approach to RoboCup legged robot systems design is based on several different software subsystems:

A responsive custom-designed motion control and walking engine,
A custom-designed color vision system based on Baysian-anaylsis of color-space training data,
A localization system based on a hybrid of partial scene reconstruction and appearance-based methods,
A medium term strategy planner based on a family of finite-state machines,
A long term planner based on switching between different behavioral modes,
A role switching behavior (possibly not used in practice),
A function abstraction layer and pseudo-real-time task scheduling architecture for inter-process communication and control,
A pose and posture estimation system that also produces odometry estimates,
Sensor fusion between multiple measurement sources including odometry and vision.

Status reports

July 28

Team is getting settled in the competition venue at the Stockholm conference center. The setup procedure has been rather chaotic, as the stage and lighting was not ready and hence cunstruction has been ongoing.

July 30

The Red Dogs lost their first competition game 3 to 1 against the team from Paris LRP. The LRP team was last year's winner. In fact, each of the 3 teams from last year won their matches today against newcomers. The McGill robots also did not fulfill their expectations due to a software problem and the team is planning to work all night to resolve it.

August 6

The Red Dogs were eliminated before they got to the final round of the competition. Happily, they managed to put in a good showing. The team is already planning next year's approach.

Benefits

Participation in this event has several advantages for us, including the following:

Pedagogical values: the team members get great experience in systems integration and real-world testing,
Experience with teamwork and project scheduling,
Technology development -- testing new ideas,
Morale building for the school and lab,
Systems stress testing for components for our existing software infrastructure,
Fun.