How to introduce a priori visual and behavioral knowledge for autonomous and mobile robots to operate in known environments

To operate in a known and dynamic environment, a robot needs two different kinds of a priori knowledge : behavioral and visual. In this paper we propose a general methodology to introduce this a priori knowledge, and we illustrate it by an application : the software developments for the AIBO robots to play soccer. The more difficult task is to extract reliable visual information. It is the reason why a priori knowledge is already introduced at the level of vision processing. Without reliable vision information it is impossible for the robot to switch to the tight behavior, and consequently to play.