1 MINHO robot football team for 2001 Fernando Ribeiro, Carlos Machado, Sérgio Sampaio, Bruno Martins Grupo de Automação e Robótica, Departamento de Electrónica Industrial, Universidade do Minho, Campus de Azurém, 4800 Guimarães, Portugal {fernando.ribeiro, carlos.machado}@dei.uminho.pt, sergio.sampaio@mail.telepac.pt, brunomartins@bitmega.com Abstract. This paper describes an autonomous robot football team. The work is being carried out since 1998. It describes the hardware used by the robots, the sensory system and interfaces, as well as the game strategy. Data acquisition for the perception level is carried out by the vision system, and the image process- ing system is described. Two cameras are used requiring sensorial fusion. With this architecture, an attempted is made to make the autonomous robots more real world intelligent. These robots have a kicker with controlled power, which allows passing the ball to a teammate with controlled distance and direction. 1 Introduction This team already participated on previous RoboCup editions and has as main goal to develop a robotic team capable of playing football as comparable as possible to hu- mans. Previous participation's allowed this team to learn and improve the robots and these are becoming more and more reliable. The most important improvements are: (a) new mechanical platform more reliable and robust; (b) kicker with controlled strength; (c) faster motor control with the use of dynamic algorithms; (d) self localiza- tion with one camera only; (e) use of two cameras per robot, requiring sensorial fusion but allowing an improved perception level; (f) improved color segmentation and ac- quisition. The next step is to improve the cooperation between the robots. For all these reasons, this team of robots is playing better than ever. 2 Hardware Architecture A new robot was built from scratch, following the know-how acquired on previous competitions, and it was tested in a Portuguese championship confirming all the changes were successful. Now, the other three robots are being built. These new ro- bots are below described. The hardware is split in two separate parts: head and tail. The head contains all the power electronics, the electronic control boards, the computer and the vision system. The tail contains the chassis, the actuators (two motors and kicker), the motor gear- boxes with encoders, the batteries and a device for ball control, hereby known as fork.