Proceedings of the 32nd ISR(International Symposium on Robotics), 19-21 April 2001 A New Interactive Robot Soccer System for Entertainment Dong-Soo Kwon 1 , Jung-Hoon Hwang 1 , Hyung-Rock Kim 1 , Jun-Ho Oh 1 , Ki-Hoon Lee 1 , YoonKeun Kwak 1 , Suk-Kwan Hong 1 , Ju-Jang Lee 2 , Sun-Gi Hong 2 and James Lee 3 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering & 2 Department of Electrical Engineering Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology 373-1 Kusong-dong, Yusong-ku, Taejon, 305-701, Korea 3 ROCCER Corp., Venture Multimedia Complex., Toryong-dong 3-1, Yusong-gu, Taejon, 305-340, Korea E-mail: kwonds@me.kaist.ac.kr Abstract This paper proposes a new robot soccer system which has the increased interaction between the operator and the soccer robot. The multiple robots are commanded by a teleoperation function. One robot is controlled by the operator while the others are controlled by a pre- programmed cooperating strategy. In order to make the teleoperation of the soccer robots more intuitive, the control of the robot is defined with respect to the ground-based coordinate system rather than the robot's. To achieve this, robust position/orientation sensing techniques have been developed. An infrared communication has been adopted to allow the wireless and isolated teleoperation of robots in the presence of multiple soccer systems. To minimize maintenance, a continuous power supply system from the ground has been developed. 1. An interactive robot soccer system for Entertainment Robot soccer systems like mirosot[1] and robocup[2] offer various research areas including vision, real-time planning, sensor fusion, learning, multi-agent system and etc. But for entertainment, a robot soccer system requires several characteristics that are not present in the above systems. It must be interactive for the wide range of users, easy for the operation, evolvable to intrigue users continuously and easily maintainable for actual markets. An interactive robot soccer system for entertainment is proposed to make a robot soccer system that has these characteristics. For interactivity, the proposed robot soccer system allows a person to take part in the control of one robot while the other robots run autonomously with a preprogrammed strategy. The operator can select the teleoperated robot arbitrarily and change the preprogrammed strategies on-line. To realize the interactive robot soccer system for entertainment, several new technologies have been developed. A teleoperation method w.r.t. the ground-based coordinates is developed for easy maneuverability of the soccer robot. To achieve teleoperation w.r.t. the ground- based coordinates, robust pose-detecting systems are developed. Cooperative algorithms, which are evolvable, are being developed. For wireless teleoperation and continuous operation without recharging, an infrared communication system and a continuous power supply system are developed. The whole system developed in this research is shown in Fig. 2. 2. Teleoperation w.r.t. the ground-based coordinates A mobile robot as shown in Fig. 3 can be controlled based on the robot-based coordinates or based on the ground-based coordinates. In Fig. 4, teleoperation w.r.t. the ground-based coordinates is shown. The teleoperation of a mobile robot w.r.t. the robot-based coordinates is difficult Fig. 1. Interactive robot soccer system Fig. 2. A photo of the whole system 751