SocRob-a society of cooperative mobile robots

The SocRob project was born as a challenge for multidisciplinary research on broad and generic approaches for the design of a cooperating society of robots, involving control, robotics and artificial intelligence researchers. In this paper we introduce some of the hardware options already taken by the group in the design of a robotic soccer team, chosen as our first case study. Each robot of the population is endowed with several sensors. The most important of them is vision. The others are linked to the main processing unit (a Pentium motherboard) by an i2c bus. Conceptual issues regarding the functional architecture of the team are also discussed. We propose a 3-level architecture, consisting of a set of context-switchable behaviors, each of them resulting of the composition of low-level task primitives