Playing soccer with legged robots

Sony has provided a remarkable platform for research and development in robotic agents, namely fully autonomous legged robots. In this paper, we describe our work using Sony´s legged robots to participate at the RoboCup´98 legged robot demonstration and competition. Robotic soccer represents a very challenging environment for research into systems with multiple robots that need to achieve concrete objectives, particularly in the presence of an adversary. Furthermore RoboCup´98 offers an excellent opportunity for robot entertainment. We introduce the RoboCup context and briefly present Sony´s legged robot. We developed a vision-based navigation and a Bayesian localization algorithm. Team strategy is achieved through pre-defined behaviors and learning by instruction