Development of a cheap on-board vision mobile robot for robotic soccer research

To promote robotic soccer research, we need a low cost and portable robot with some sensors and a communication device. To date, there is no platform for robotic soccer. Therefore, each research must build his own robots or utilize robots which are commercially available. This paper describes how to construct a robot system which includes a lightweight and low-cost mobile robot with visual, tactile sensors, TCP/IP communication device, and portable PC where Linux is running. An example of the developed soccer robot system and preliminary experimental results are also shown