Physics-based Planning

Posted 3 Jun 2010 at 15:52 UTC by jlin

Later this month, Carnegie Mellon's CMDragons small-size robotic soccer team will be competing again at RoboCup, to be held in Singapore. CMDragons has tended to find their edge in their software as opposed to their hardware. Their latest software advantage will be their new "physics-based planning", using physics to decide how to move and turn with the ball in order to maintain control. Previous control strategies simply planned where the robot should move to and shoot from, assuming a ball placed at the front center of the dribbler bar would stay there. The goal of Robocup is to create a humanoid robotic soccer team to compete against human players in 2050. Manuela Veloso, the professor who leads the Carnegie Mellon robotic soccer lab, "believe[s] that the physics-based planning algorithm is a particularly noteworthy accomplishment" that will take the effort one step closer to the collective goal.

Carnegie Mellon's CMDragons small-size robotic soccer team was one of the founding members of the small-size league, participating in every year since it's inception in 1997. They regularly place as one of the top teams, and have won twice. This league requires participants to both build the robots as well as write the software.