Our team which has its "home" in the UWA mobile robot lab was named after the new and successful Perth Glory soccer team. The heart of the robots are the the EyeBot controllers, developed by a team around Thomas Braunl. We use a Motorola 68332 32-bit controller, which offer a variety of digital/analog I/O facilities. We developed our own operating system RoBIOS for the systems, which allows a great deal of flexibility. I.e. the same EyeBot system is also used for 6-legged and biped walking machines, and - as a boxed version - for undergraduate courses in assembly language.
We incorporated a digital color camera and a graphics display. All image processing is done on-board. Our robots have local intelligence and are not simple pawns, directed by a central system with global vision. Although our approach is clearly disadvanted in respect of winning a RoboCup competition, we are more interested in research on general purpose intelligent agents, as opposed to building a system which serves only a certain competition and has to rely on global sensors.
Each robot has shaft encoders and infrared range sensors in addition to a digital color camera. We are currently incorporating wireless transmissions to allow the robots to talk to each other plus a ball kicking device. We are able to operate even without communication betwen the robots. Each robot will be told its starting position and will use its shaft encoders to keep track of its current position. However, communication will allow much more sophisticated behaviours like passing a ball to another robot.
