Team Description of the GMD RoboCup-Team A.Siegberg,A.Bredenfeld,H.Guenther,H.U.Kobialka,B.Klaassen,U.Licht, K.L.Paap,P.G.Ploeger,H.Streich,J.Vollmer,J.Wilberg,R.Worst,andT. Christaller GMD, Institute for System Design Technology, D-53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany, siegberg, bredenfeld, guenther, kobialka, klaassen, licht, paap, ploeger, streich, vollmer, wilberg, worst, christaller@gmd.de Abstract. The article describes the structure of the GMD robots de- veloped for the RoboCup ’98. The hardware of these robots consists of an aluminum chassis with differential drives. They have low level sensors (odometry, distance sensors etc.) and a NewtonLab vision system. The software is organized in a layered structure using a uniform design pat- tern on each layer. A synchronous communication paradigm is adopted for the information exchange between the different layers. 1 Introduction Inorderforarobotteamtoactuallyperformasoccergame[1][3]varioustech- nologiesmustbeincorporate:designprinciplesofautonomousrobots(hardware and software design), networking, strategy acquisition, sensor fusion and actor controlling.Wepresentthedesignmethodologyforateamofmiddlesizedrobots. The next section contains our design guidelines for the RoboCup scenario. Section 3 gives a detailed description of the GMD-robot. The system software is structured in four layers. Each layer uses a similar design pattern. Section 4 and 5 present the details of this structure. In section 6 we introduce our firststrategyplanningconcepts.Concludingthepaperwepresentresultsofour robotic activities. 2 Design Guidelines For the RoboCup project we define some design guidelines to develop skillful soccer playing robots. The robots should cope with a dynamically changing environment and a quickly moving ball. Autonomous systems, such as these robots, need to be physically strong, computational fast and behaviorally accurate to behave sensible in the rapidly changingenvironmentofasoccerfield.Inourgeneralarchitectureweimplement therefore strong motors, simple sensors and simple stereotype movements to guarantee the basic qualifications. M. Asada and H. Kitano (Eds.): RoboCup-98, LNAI 1604, pp. 473-478, 1999. c Springer-Verlag Heidelberg Berlin 1999