A team of soccer robots for RoboCup competitions in SSL league: system and algorithms

Introduction: The international RoboCup soccer tournaments for robots have been held since the mid-1990s and have attracted a lot of attention from universities all over the world. Their goal is to develop scientific and engineering research in the areas of robotics, artificial intelligence, computer vision, navigation, group and multi-agent interaction of robots and mechatronic devices. Purpose: To create a new generation research bench which assists in developing, training and evaluating soccer robots, as well as developing basic algorithms for managing an individual soccer robot or a group of them. Results: A stand was designed to develop and analyze algorithms for control over a group of robots and navigation in a highly dynamic environment with centralized control organized as follows: the computing center receives data from a video surveillance system, uses the obtained information about the positions of the robots and the ball and about the state of their sensors to calculate control commands (velocity vector, angular velocity, impact signal) which are then transmitted to the robots for execution. Basic control algorithms for robot soccer players, such as: moving to a point, turning on a point, movement around a circle, obstacle avoidance, taking a pass, goalkeeper actions, hitting a set point, as well as a game model for two field players acting against a goalkeeper were implemented and used to test the stand performance, to record the qualification video and to prepare documents for the participation of St. Petersburg State University team in the RoboCup Small Size League final, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.