Vision, Kinematics and Game strategy in Multi-Robot Systems like MSL RoboCup Fernando Ribeiro, Ivo Moutinho, Pedro Silva, Carlos Fraga, Nino Pereira Grupo de Automação e Robótica, Departamento de Electrónica Industrial, Universidade do Minho, Campus de Azurém, 4800 Guimarães, Portugal fernando.ribeiro@dei.uminho.pt , ivo@aeiou.pt , pedro_silva@portugalmail.com , carlosfraga@portugalmail.pt , ninopereira@clix.pt Abstract. In Multi-Robot systems like the RoboCup football challenge, there are a small number of key issues which are of extreme relevance for the successfulness of the final application. In MSL RoboCup these main issues are three: a) The vision system, which has to be as reliable and fast as possible in order to perceive the necessary entities to carry out the game actions; b) Correct kinematics of the robot, that makes the robots move towards the desired goal in the fastest, shortest and optimized away; c) Game strategy, which needs collaboration and communication between all the agents in the field. Other issues are also important but these three consist of the fundamental ones towards the next step in this challenge which is ball pass between the robots in a controlled way. A team of robots will only be able to pass the ball to another robot only when these three issues are sorted out. This paper describes how these three issues were tackled by the MINHO team and shows their next directions. 1. Introduction Although many teams prefer to buy a standard off the shelf robotic platform and implement some changes in hardware/software, Minho team which participates on RoboCup since 1999, builds its own platforms from scratch. Being part of an Industrial Electronics department they build the mechanics, hardware and software, bearing in mind a very low budget. This continuous participation in RoboCup led to some new developments in many fields. The next step of this team is to pass the ball between robots. In order to achieve this, three key issues need to be sorted out: the vision system, correct kinematics of the robot and game strategy which implies collaboration and communication between the agents in the field. These issues are described in the following sections of this paper. 2. MINHO Team Robots Description A short and very brief description of the MINHO team robots is made in this section. Since the robots were completely developed within our labs, they were planned and drawn in a CAD system in order to check its assemblability (see Fig. 1) and only then they were built. Some mistakes could be prevented by drawing them first.