Communications for cooperation: the RoboCup 4-legged passing challenge

Communications are the basis for the collaborative activities in the TeamChaos 4-legged team. In this paper we present the communications architecture developed both to let teammates communicate, and to easy the debugging of robot behaviors from external computers. Details of its implementation on the aiBo robots are also given. Using this infrastructure we describe a protocol for role exchange named Switch! that we have created. We also describe the use of both the communication architecture, and the Switch! protocol in the passing challenge of the 2006 edition of the RoboCup