Nuno Lau | Universidade de Aveiro (original) (raw)

Papers by Nuno Lau

When building a representation of the environment for a robot in a multi-agent application, as is... more When building a representation of the environment for a robot in a multi-agent application, as is the case of robotic soccer, sensor and information fusion of several elements of the environment are an important task. To build an increasingly better world model, one of the aspects that one should consider is the treatment of obstacles. This paper gives an insight of the general steps necessary for a good obstacle representation in the robot world model. A first step is the visual detection of the obstacles in the image acquired by the robot. This is done using an algorithm based on radial search lines and colour-based blobs detection, where each obstacle is identified and delimited. After having the visually detected obstacles, a fusion with a-priori known information about the obstacles characteristics allows the obstacle separation and filtering, so that obstacles that don’t fill the criteria are discarded. With the position information shared by team mates, the matching of the obstacles and the team mates positions is also possible, thus identifying each of them. Finally, and with the purpose of having a team world model as coherent as possible, the robots are able to share the obstacle information of each other. The work presented in this paper was developed for the CAMBADA robotic soccer team. After achieving the 1st place in the Portuguese robotics open Robótica2008 and in the Robocup2008 world championship, the correct treatment of obstacles was one of the new challenges proposed among the team to improve the performance for the next competitions.

FC Portugal is a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto in Portugal. FC... more FC Portugal is a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto in Portugal. FC Portugal 2001 is our second step towards the creation of a flexible RoboSoccer team, with tactical changing abilities, that may be coached at any level, before and during the games, by human or automatic coaches. Although having the best goal average in the competition (scoring 150 goals in 13 games), the team was not able to score against the good defenses of Tsinghuaeolus and Brainstomers and finished third in RoboCup 2001.

In this paper we describe our work on computational mind model for temperamental decision algorit... more In this paper we describe our work on computational mind model for temperamental decision algorithms using Fuzzy Logic and an implementation of an emotional-behavioral multi-agent system for analysis and evaluation of different strategies based on temperamental behaviors. We describe our approach to emotional model using temperamental decision system based on theory about general types of superior nervous systems in humans and animals and we explain how we can apply Fuzzy Logic on temperamental decision system. We describe the simulation environment used in this work to test and evaluate the strategies. We have conducted a set of robotic experiments in order to test the performance of the system on its first implementation phase. The results achieved showed that the different set of temperamental characteristics influences significantly the performance of the agents and give us very positive feedback to proceed with this research and implementation in new directions.

FC Portugal legged league team is the successor of FC Portus team that achieved 5 th place in Rob... more FC Portugal legged league team is the successor of FC Portus team that achieved 5 th place in RoboCup 2003 and 9 th place in RoboCup 2004. FC Portugal team is being developed by a research group with a long and successful experience in RoboCup (simulation, small-size and middle-size leagues) and results from the combined efforts of several research laboratories, universities and schools. It also uses several research methodologies and code from our teams in other leagues (FC Portugal -simulation and coach leagues and 5DPO -small and middle size leagues). Our 2005 team includes several research innovations (like the effective use of Situation Based Strategic Positioning, Dynamic Role Exchange, Tactical Flexibility and Automatic Color Calibration). Although we are still in the process of adapting our 2004 code to the new ERS7 robots, we already have the new robots playing on the field and we are confident that our new team will be a lot more robust and flexible in its coordination methodologies and soccer playing strategies.

This paper presents a hybrid behaviour process for performing collaborative tasks and coordinatio... more This paper presents a hybrid behaviour process for performing collaborative tasks and coordination capabilities in a rescue team. RoboCup Rescue simulator and its associated international competition are used as the testbed for our proposal. Unlike other published work in this field one of our main concerns is having good results on RoboCup Rescue championships by emerging behaviour in agents using a biological paradigm. The benefit comes from the hierarchic and parallel organisation of the mammalian brain. In our behaviour process, Artificial Neural Networks are used in order to make agents capable of learning information from the environment. This allows agents to improve several algorithms like their Path Finding Algorithm to find the shortest path between two points. Also, we aim to filter the most important messages that arise from the environment, to make the right choice on the best path planning among many alternatives, in a short time. A policy action was implemented using Kohonen’s network, Dijkstra’s and D* algorithm. This policy has achieved good results in our tests, getting our team classified for RoboCup Rescue Simulation League 2005.

Computing Research Repository, 2008

Recent advances in neurosciences and psychology have provided evidence that affective phenomena p... more Recent advances in neurosciences and psychology have provided evidence that affective phenomena pervade intelligence at many levels, being inseparable from the cognitionaction loop. Perception, attention, memory, learning, decisionmaking, adaptation, communication and social interaction are some of the aspects influenced by them. This work draws its inspirations from neurobiology, psychophysics and sociology to approach the problem of building autonomous robots capable of interacting with each other and building strategies based on temperamental decision mechanism. Modelling emotions is a relatively recent focus in artificial intelligence and cognitive modelling. Such models can ideally inform our understanding of human behavior. We may see the development of computational models of emotion as a core research focus that will facilitate advances in the large array of computational systems that model, interpret or influence human behavior. We propose a model based on a scalable, flexible and modular approach to emotion which allows runtime evaluation between emotional quality and performance. The results achieved showed that the strategies based on temperamental decision mechanism strongly influence the system performance and there are evident dependency between emotional state of the agents and their temperamental type, as well as the dependency between the team performance and the temperamental configuration of the team members, and this enable us to conclude that the modular approach to emotional programming based on temperamental theory is the good choice to develop computational mind models for emotional behavioral Multi-Agent systems.

FC Portugal is the result of a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto i... more FC Portugal is the result of a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto in Portugal. The project started in February 2000 and only three months later, in Amsterdam, FC Portugal became the first European Champion of RoboCup scoring a total of 86 goals without conceding a single goal. Three months later, in Melbourne, FC Portugal became RoboCup Simulation League World Champion scoring 94 goals, again without conceding any goal. This paper briefly describes some of the most relevant research developments and innovations that lead to FC Portugal team success.

Biped walking by using all joint movements and DOFs in both directions (sagittal plane and corona... more Biped walking by using all joint movements and DOFs in both directions (sagittal plane and coronal plane) is one of the most complicated research topics in robotics. In this paper, angular trajectories of a stable biped walking for a humanoid robot are generated by a Truncated Fourier Series (TFS) approach. The movements of legs and arms in sagittal plane are implemented by an optimized gait generator and a new model is proposed that can also produce the movement of legs in coronal plane based on TFS. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to find the best angular trajectories and optimize TFS. Experimental results show that the using joints movements in sagittal and coronal planes to compose the walking skill allowed the biped robot to walk faster than previous methods that only used the joints in sagittal plane.

Controlling a biped robot with several degrees of freedom is a challenging task that takes the at... more Controlling a biped robot with several degrees of freedom is a challenging task that takes the attention of several researchers in the fields of biology, physics, electronics, computer science and mechanics. For a humanoid robot to perform in complex environments, fast, stable and adaptive behaviors are required. This paper proposes a solution for automatic generation of a walking gait using genetic algorithms (GA). A method based on partial Fourier series was developed for joint trajectory planning. GAs were then used for offline generation of the parameters that define the gait. GAs proved to be a powerful method for automatic generation of humanoid behaviors resulting on a walk forward velocity of 0.51m/s which is a good result considering the results of the three best teams of RoboCup 3D simulation league for the same movement.

In this paper we are proposing an approach for coordinating a team of homogeneous agents based on... more In this paper we are proposing an approach for coordinating a team of homogeneous agents based on a flexible common Team Strategy as well as on the concepts of Situation Based Strategic Positioning and Dynamic Positioning and Role Exchange. We also introduce an Agent Architecture including a specific high-level decision module capable of implementing this strategy. Our proposal is based on the formalization of what is a team strategy for competing with an opponent team having opposite goals. A team strategy is composed of a set of agent types and a set of tactics, which are also composed of several formations. Formations are used for different situations and assign each agent a default spatial positioning and an agent type (defining its behaviour at several levels). Agent’s reactivity is also introduced for appropriate response to the dynamics of the current situation. However, in our approach this is done in a way that preserves team coherence instead of permitting uncoordinated agent behaviour. We have applied, with success, this coordination approach to the RoboSoccer simulated domain. The FC Portugal team, developed using this approach won the RoboCup2000 (simulation league) European and World championships scoring a total of 180 goals and conceding none.

Abstract. Controlling a biped robot with several degrees of freedom is a challenging task that ta... more Abstract. Controlling a biped robot with several degrees of freedom is a challenging task that takes the attention of several researchers in the fields of biology, physics, electronics, computer science and mechanics. For a humanoid robot to perform in complex environments, fast, stable and adaptable behaviors are required. Developing robust behaviors requires the development of methods for joint trajectory planning and lowlevel control. Several methods are part of the state of the art, including trajectory-based ...

FC Portugal Rescue team is the result of a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro... more FC Portugal Rescue team is the result of a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto in Portugal. The project started in January 2004 following previous collaborations of these two Portuguese Universities in RoboCup simulation league and associated competitions: coach competition, simulation league presentation competition and simulation 3D competition. FC Portugal Rescue project intends to fully adapt the coordination methodologies developed by FC Portugal simulated soccer team to the search and rescue scenario. Although our team was not ready for participating in RoboCup 2004, the first results achieved were very encouraging, making us believe that, after fully implementing our simulated soccer coordination methodologies in our rescue team, our result may be a lot better.

This document introduces COACH UNILANG, a standard language for coaching (Robo)Soccer teams. This... more This document introduces COACH UNILANG, a standard language for coaching (Robo)Soccer teams. This language was developed with two main objectives: to coach FC Portugal 2001 team and as a proposal to be used in Fukuoka 2002 RoboCup coach competition. This language enables high-level and low-level coaching through coach instructions. High-level coaching includes changing tactics, formations used in each situation and changing player behavior. Low-level coaching includes defining formations, situations, player behavior and positioning with high detail. The language also enables the coach (functioning like an assistant coach) to send opponent modeling information and game statistical information to the players.

This paper presents the evaluation of computational mind model based on temperamental decision al... more This paper presents the evaluation of computational mind model based on temperamental decision algorithms with emotional behaviors. Our computational model of emotion is inspired on appraisal theory and on superior nervous system characteristics. We define the model for temperamental agent with emotions. In this paper we prove that teams of the agents with different temperaments have different performances in the same simulation scenario. The result shows that strategies based on temperamental decision mechanism strongly influence system performance and there are evident dependencies between emotional states of agents and their temperamental type, as well as dependencies between the team performance and team configuration, and this enables us to conclude that modular approach to emotional programming based on temperamental theory is a good choice to develop computational mind models for emotional behavioral Multi-Agent systems.

The fall of chess as a main domain for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, after the victory o... more The fall of chess as a main domain for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, after the victory of Deep Blue over Kasparov, put forward robotic soccer as a new challenging domain for AI researchers. Robotic Soccer is very appropriate for researching in Distributed AI problems, e.g. coordination methodologies, whose results can later be applied to other domains. Coordination can be defined as the capability of several agents to work together as a team, in order to accomplish a common goal. In the context of robotic soccer, several aspects may benefit from appropriate coordination methodologies, since team play is decisive for winning the games. This paper presents a methodology to enable a team of robotic soccer agents to coordinate their positioning in the field, and a methodology that enables them to cooperatively execute predefined setplays (flexible plans). Both coordination methods are used in real soccer and sports in general, commonly known as formations and set plays respectively. However, its use in a team of autonomous agents is still unexplored and is a major innovation of this work. A graphical tool to define formations and setplays was fully developed in the context of this work offering a quicker and more appealing way to define both formations and setplays. The tool's interface was inspired on "blackboard" applications, used nowadays for the same purpose in real sports. The tool enables very easy definition of setplays that may then be executed in realtime during the matches. Examples of complete setplays and their practical execution are also described, showing the usefulness of the setplay concept and the utility of the developed tool.

The CAMBADA middle-size robotic soccer team is described in this paper. This team was designed an... more The CAMBADA middle-size robotic soccer team is described in this paper. This team was designed and is being developed by the authors, from scratch, during the last six months. The players, completely built in-house, incorporate several innovations at the hardware level, particularly the sensing and computational subsystems. At the software level, cooperative sensing uses a real-time database implemented over a real-time Linux kernel. Previous experience of the team in the simulation league has been highly relevant. Coordination approaches previously tested in that league are being integrated in the CAMBADA team.

This paper presents the architecture and algorithms developed for Dom Dinis, a simple compass-gui... more This paper presents the architecture and algorithms developed for Dom Dinis, a simple compass-guided robot built by the authors. This includes environment exploration, task planning and task execution. Environment exploration, based on repeating a reactive goal search, enables a progressive construction of a grid-based map. Based on the (possibly incomplete) map, the robot is able to plan its tasks. The execution capabilities of the robot include exception handling. Essential to all these capabilities is the knowledge of the robot's position in the world. The position is computed based on tracking traversed distances and followed orientations. Orientation is given by a compass. Dom Dinis doesn't use wheel encoders at all.

The paper discusses some new hardware and software tools that can be used for the design of virtu... more The paper discusses some new hardware and software tools that can be used for the design of virtual circuits based on dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs. With the aid of these tools we can implement a system that requires some, hardware resources Rc, on available hardware that has resources Rh, where Rc>Rh. The main idea of the approach supported by these tools is the rational combination of FPGA capabilities with some proposed methods for producing a modifiable specification, together with a novel technique for architectural and logic synthesis, which has been incorporated into the new design environment

The Micro-Rato Contest of the University of Aveiro is a competition among small autonomous mobile... more The Micro-Rato Contest of the University of Aveiro is a competition among small autonomous mobile robots that is organized by the Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics Department of that institution. The contest aims at promoting, in a festival-like environment, the practical and integrated use of several topics typically taught in electronics and informatics courses. The contest takes places annually since 1995, and a software-based counter-part, the Ciber-Rato contest, started in 2001. The total participation has been significant, not only of local students but also from other schools and even ex-students. Along these years a substantial amount of related literature was produced, covering the main technical issues that need to be dealt with when participating in the contest. In this paper we put together such literature and review those main technical issues, namely related to sensing, motor control, behavior programming and coordination.

The use of single viewpoint catadioptric vision systems is a common approach in mobile robotics, ... more The use of single viewpoint catadioptric vision systems is a common approach in mobile robotics, despite the constraints imposed by those systems. A general solution to calculate the robot centered distances map on non-SVP catadioptric setups, exploring a back-propagation ray-tracing approach and the mathematical properties of the mirror surface is discussed in this paper. Results from this technique applied in the robots of the CAMBADA team (Cooperative Autonomous Mobile Robots with Advanced Distributed Architecture) are presented, showing the effectiveness of the solution.

When building a representation of the environment for a robot in a multi-agent application, as is... more When building a representation of the environment for a robot in a multi-agent application, as is the case of robotic soccer, sensor and information fusion of several elements of the environment are an important task. To build an increasingly better world model, one of the aspects that one should consider is the treatment of obstacles. This paper gives an insight of the general steps necessary for a good obstacle representation in the robot world model. A first step is the visual detection of the obstacles in the image acquired by the robot. This is done using an algorithm based on radial search lines and colour-based blobs detection, where each obstacle is identified and delimited. After having the visually detected obstacles, a fusion with a-priori known information about the obstacles characteristics allows the obstacle separation and filtering, so that obstacles that don’t fill the criteria are discarded. With the position information shared by team mates, the matching of the obstacles and the team mates positions is also possible, thus identifying each of them. Finally, and with the purpose of having a team world model as coherent as possible, the robots are able to share the obstacle information of each other. The work presented in this paper was developed for the CAMBADA robotic soccer team. After achieving the 1st place in the Portuguese robotics open Robótica2008 and in the Robocup2008 world championship, the correct treatment of obstacles was one of the new challenges proposed among the team to improve the performance for the next competitions.

FC Portugal is a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto in Portugal. FC... more FC Portugal is a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto in Portugal. FC Portugal 2001 is our second step towards the creation of a flexible RoboSoccer team, with tactical changing abilities, that may be coached at any level, before and during the games, by human or automatic coaches. Although having the best goal average in the competition (scoring 150 goals in 13 games), the team was not able to score against the good defenses of Tsinghuaeolus and Brainstomers and finished third in RoboCup 2001.

In this paper we describe our work on computational mind model for temperamental decision algorit... more In this paper we describe our work on computational mind model for temperamental decision algorithms using Fuzzy Logic and an implementation of an emotional-behavioral multi-agent system for analysis and evaluation of different strategies based on temperamental behaviors. We describe our approach to emotional model using temperamental decision system based on theory about general types of superior nervous systems in humans and animals and we explain how we can apply Fuzzy Logic on temperamental decision system. We describe the simulation environment used in this work to test and evaluate the strategies. We have conducted a set of robotic experiments in order to test the performance of the system on its first implementation phase. The results achieved showed that the different set of temperamental characteristics influences significantly the performance of the agents and give us very positive feedback to proceed with this research and implementation in new directions.

FC Portugal legged league team is the successor of FC Portus team that achieved 5 th place in Rob... more FC Portugal legged league team is the successor of FC Portus team that achieved 5 th place in RoboCup 2003 and 9 th place in RoboCup 2004. FC Portugal team is being developed by a research group with a long and successful experience in RoboCup (simulation, small-size and middle-size leagues) and results from the combined efforts of several research laboratories, universities and schools. It also uses several research methodologies and code from our teams in other leagues (FC Portugal -simulation and coach leagues and 5DPO -small and middle size leagues). Our 2005 team includes several research innovations (like the effective use of Situation Based Strategic Positioning, Dynamic Role Exchange, Tactical Flexibility and Automatic Color Calibration). Although we are still in the process of adapting our 2004 code to the new ERS7 robots, we already have the new robots playing on the field and we are confident that our new team will be a lot more robust and flexible in its coordination methodologies and soccer playing strategies.

This paper presents a hybrid behaviour process for performing collaborative tasks and coordinatio... more This paper presents a hybrid behaviour process for performing collaborative tasks and coordination capabilities in a rescue team. RoboCup Rescue simulator and its associated international competition are used as the testbed for our proposal. Unlike other published work in this field one of our main concerns is having good results on RoboCup Rescue championships by emerging behaviour in agents using a biological paradigm. The benefit comes from the hierarchic and parallel organisation of the mammalian brain. In our behaviour process, Artificial Neural Networks are used in order to make agents capable of learning information from the environment. This allows agents to improve several algorithms like their Path Finding Algorithm to find the shortest path between two points. Also, we aim to filter the most important messages that arise from the environment, to make the right choice on the best path planning among many alternatives, in a short time. A policy action was implemented using Kohonen’s network, Dijkstra’s and D* algorithm. This policy has achieved good results in our tests, getting our team classified for RoboCup Rescue Simulation League 2005.

Computing Research Repository, 2008

Recent advances in neurosciences and psychology have provided evidence that affective phenomena p... more Recent advances in neurosciences and psychology have provided evidence that affective phenomena pervade intelligence at many levels, being inseparable from the cognitionaction loop. Perception, attention, memory, learning, decisionmaking, adaptation, communication and social interaction are some of the aspects influenced by them. This work draws its inspirations from neurobiology, psychophysics and sociology to approach the problem of building autonomous robots capable of interacting with each other and building strategies based on temperamental decision mechanism. Modelling emotions is a relatively recent focus in artificial intelligence and cognitive modelling. Such models can ideally inform our understanding of human behavior. We may see the development of computational models of emotion as a core research focus that will facilitate advances in the large array of computational systems that model, interpret or influence human behavior. We propose a model based on a scalable, flexible and modular approach to emotion which allows runtime evaluation between emotional quality and performance. The results achieved showed that the strategies based on temperamental decision mechanism strongly influence the system performance and there are evident dependency between emotional state of the agents and their temperamental type, as well as the dependency between the team performance and the temperamental configuration of the team members, and this enable us to conclude that the modular approach to emotional programming based on temperamental theory is the good choice to develop computational mind models for emotional behavioral Multi-Agent systems.

FC Portugal is the result of a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto i... more FC Portugal is the result of a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto in Portugal. The project started in February 2000 and only three months later, in Amsterdam, FC Portugal became the first European Champion of RoboCup scoring a total of 86 goals without conceding a single goal. Three months later, in Melbourne, FC Portugal became RoboCup Simulation League World Champion scoring 94 goals, again without conceding any goal. This paper briefly describes some of the most relevant research developments and innovations that lead to FC Portugal team success.

Biped walking by using all joint movements and DOFs in both directions (sagittal plane and corona... more Biped walking by using all joint movements and DOFs in both directions (sagittal plane and coronal plane) is one of the most complicated research topics in robotics. In this paper, angular trajectories of a stable biped walking for a humanoid robot are generated by a Truncated Fourier Series (TFS) approach. The movements of legs and arms in sagittal plane are implemented by an optimized gait generator and a new model is proposed that can also produce the movement of legs in coronal plane based on TFS. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to find the best angular trajectories and optimize TFS. Experimental results show that the using joints movements in sagittal and coronal planes to compose the walking skill allowed the biped robot to walk faster than previous methods that only used the joints in sagittal plane.

Controlling a biped robot with several degrees of freedom is a challenging task that takes the at... more Controlling a biped robot with several degrees of freedom is a challenging task that takes the attention of several researchers in the fields of biology, physics, electronics, computer science and mechanics. For a humanoid robot to perform in complex environments, fast, stable and adaptive behaviors are required. This paper proposes a solution for automatic generation of a walking gait using genetic algorithms (GA). A method based on partial Fourier series was developed for joint trajectory planning. GAs were then used for offline generation of the parameters that define the gait. GAs proved to be a powerful method for automatic generation of humanoid behaviors resulting on a walk forward velocity of 0.51m/s which is a good result considering the results of the three best teams of RoboCup 3D simulation league for the same movement.

In this paper we are proposing an approach for coordinating a team of homogeneous agents based on... more In this paper we are proposing an approach for coordinating a team of homogeneous agents based on a flexible common Team Strategy as well as on the concepts of Situation Based Strategic Positioning and Dynamic Positioning and Role Exchange. We also introduce an Agent Architecture including a specific high-level decision module capable of implementing this strategy. Our proposal is based on the formalization of what is a team strategy for competing with an opponent team having opposite goals. A team strategy is composed of a set of agent types and a set of tactics, which are also composed of several formations. Formations are used for different situations and assign each agent a default spatial positioning and an agent type (defining its behaviour at several levels). Agent’s reactivity is also introduced for appropriate response to the dynamics of the current situation. However, in our approach this is done in a way that preserves team coherence instead of permitting uncoordinated agent behaviour. We have applied, with success, this coordination approach to the RoboSoccer simulated domain. The FC Portugal team, developed using this approach won the RoboCup2000 (simulation league) European and World championships scoring a total of 180 goals and conceding none.

Abstract. Controlling a biped robot with several degrees of freedom is a challenging task that ta... more Abstract. Controlling a biped robot with several degrees of freedom is a challenging task that takes the attention of several researchers in the fields of biology, physics, electronics, computer science and mechanics. For a humanoid robot to perform in complex environments, fast, stable and adaptable behaviors are required. Developing robust behaviors requires the development of methods for joint trajectory planning and lowlevel control. Several methods are part of the state of the art, including trajectory-based ...

FC Portugal Rescue team is the result of a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro... more FC Portugal Rescue team is the result of a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto in Portugal. The project started in January 2004 following previous collaborations of these two Portuguese Universities in RoboCup simulation league and associated competitions: coach competition, simulation league presentation competition and simulation 3D competition. FC Portugal Rescue project intends to fully adapt the coordination methodologies developed by FC Portugal simulated soccer team to the search and rescue scenario. Although our team was not ready for participating in RoboCup 2004, the first results achieved were very encouraging, making us believe that, after fully implementing our simulated soccer coordination methodologies in our rescue team, our result may be a lot better.

This document introduces COACH UNILANG, a standard language for coaching (Robo)Soccer teams. This... more This document introduces COACH UNILANG, a standard language for coaching (Robo)Soccer teams. This language was developed with two main objectives: to coach FC Portugal 2001 team and as a proposal to be used in Fukuoka 2002 RoboCup coach competition. This language enables high-level and low-level coaching through coach instructions. High-level coaching includes changing tactics, formations used in each situation and changing player behavior. Low-level coaching includes defining formations, situations, player behavior and positioning with high detail. The language also enables the coach (functioning like an assistant coach) to send opponent modeling information and game statistical information to the players.

This paper presents the evaluation of computational mind model based on temperamental decision al... more This paper presents the evaluation of computational mind model based on temperamental decision algorithms with emotional behaviors. Our computational model of emotion is inspired on appraisal theory and on superior nervous system characteristics. We define the model for temperamental agent with emotions. In this paper we prove that teams of the agents with different temperaments have different performances in the same simulation scenario. The result shows that strategies based on temperamental decision mechanism strongly influence system performance and there are evident dependencies between emotional states of agents and their temperamental type, as well as dependencies between the team performance and team configuration, and this enables us to conclude that modular approach to emotional programming based on temperamental theory is a good choice to develop computational mind models for emotional behavioral Multi-Agent systems.

The fall of chess as a main domain for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, after the victory o... more The fall of chess as a main domain for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, after the victory of Deep Blue over Kasparov, put forward robotic soccer as a new challenging domain for AI researchers. Robotic Soccer is very appropriate for researching in Distributed AI problems, e.g. coordination methodologies, whose results can later be applied to other domains. Coordination can be defined as the capability of several agents to work together as a team, in order to accomplish a common goal. In the context of robotic soccer, several aspects may benefit from appropriate coordination methodologies, since team play is decisive for winning the games. This paper presents a methodology to enable a team of robotic soccer agents to coordinate their positioning in the field, and a methodology that enables them to cooperatively execute predefined setplays (flexible plans). Both coordination methods are used in real soccer and sports in general, commonly known as formations and set plays respectively. However, its use in a team of autonomous agents is still unexplored and is a major innovation of this work. A graphical tool to define formations and setplays was fully developed in the context of this work offering a quicker and more appealing way to define both formations and setplays. The tool's interface was inspired on "blackboard" applications, used nowadays for the same purpose in real sports. The tool enables very easy definition of setplays that may then be executed in realtime during the matches. Examples of complete setplays and their practical execution are also described, showing the usefulness of the setplay concept and the utility of the developed tool.

The CAMBADA middle-size robotic soccer team is described in this paper. This team was designed an... more The CAMBADA middle-size robotic soccer team is described in this paper. This team was designed and is being developed by the authors, from scratch, during the last six months. The players, completely built in-house, incorporate several innovations at the hardware level, particularly the sensing and computational subsystems. At the software level, cooperative sensing uses a real-time database implemented over a real-time Linux kernel. Previous experience of the team in the simulation league has been highly relevant. Coordination approaches previously tested in that league are being integrated in the CAMBADA team.

This paper presents the architecture and algorithms developed for Dom Dinis, a simple compass-gui... more This paper presents the architecture and algorithms developed for Dom Dinis, a simple compass-guided robot built by the authors. This includes environment exploration, task planning and task execution. Environment exploration, based on repeating a reactive goal search, enables a progressive construction of a grid-based map. Based on the (possibly incomplete) map, the robot is able to plan its tasks. The execution capabilities of the robot include exception handling. Essential to all these capabilities is the knowledge of the robot's position in the world. The position is computed based on tracking traversed distances and followed orientations. Orientation is given by a compass. Dom Dinis doesn't use wheel encoders at all.

The paper discusses some new hardware and software tools that can be used for the design of virtu... more The paper discusses some new hardware and software tools that can be used for the design of virtual circuits based on dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs. With the aid of these tools we can implement a system that requires some, hardware resources Rc, on available hardware that has resources Rh, where Rc>Rh. The main idea of the approach supported by these tools is the rational combination of FPGA capabilities with some proposed methods for producing a modifiable specification, together with a novel technique for architectural and logic synthesis, which has been incorporated into the new design environment

The Micro-Rato Contest of the University of Aveiro is a competition among small autonomous mobile... more The Micro-Rato Contest of the University of Aveiro is a competition among small autonomous mobile robots that is organized by the Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics Department of that institution. The contest aims at promoting, in a festival-like environment, the practical and integrated use of several topics typically taught in electronics and informatics courses. The contest takes places annually since 1995, and a software-based counter-part, the Ciber-Rato contest, started in 2001. The total participation has been significant, not only of local students but also from other schools and even ex-students. Along these years a substantial amount of related literature was produced, covering the main technical issues that need to be dealt with when participating in the contest. In this paper we put together such literature and review those main technical issues, namely related to sensing, motor control, behavior programming and coordination.

The use of single viewpoint catadioptric vision systems is a common approach in mobile robotics, ... more The use of single viewpoint catadioptric vision systems is a common approach in mobile robotics, despite the constraints imposed by those systems. A general solution to calculate the robot centered distances map on non-SVP catadioptric setups, exploring a back-propagation ray-tracing approach and the mathematical properties of the mirror surface is discussed in this paper. Results from this technique applied in the robots of the CAMBADA team (Cooperative Autonomous Mobile Robots with Advanced Distributed Architecture) are presented, showing the effectiveness of the solution.