Khepera Robot Soccer for Fun and Serious Learning.

Joaquin Sitte

Smart Devices Lab

Playing a soccer-like game with small mobile robots is not only great fun for technology fans but also a great technical challenge and educational experience. Numerous categories are open to competitors under the umbrella of two international championships: the RoboCup and the FIRA World Cup.

The various leagues are quite demanding though in terms of resources and effort required from the participants. Often quite sophisticated robots have to be built. Five or more of them are required for a team and the playing fields are of the size of small room. In many cases powerful computer vision is required. Not surprisingly teams of advanced undergraduate and postgraduate engineering students from universities dominate the tournaments.

The Kheperasot (http://www.fira.net) league from FIRA (Federation of International Robot-Soccer Associations) offers a challenging game yet the entry cost is significantly lower than for most other leagues. There is no need to build robots as the Khepera robots are commercially available general purpose research robots. A Khepera robot is of the size of a small coffee cup and thus the playing field can be small enough to fit on a desk or table. There is no expensive external vision system and no wireless communication. In its simplest form only one robot is needed per team. The technical challenge in this league resides in programming the robots to play a truly autonomous game. Once a robot is let loose on the playing field it has to fend with its own sensors and computing resources. The robot has be capable of locating itself in a simplified environment, recognize landmarks (goals) and other moving objects (ball, opponent) and move quickly and purposefully to outsmart the adversary. And it has to achieve all this with the sensing and computing devices fitting in such a small robot. A C programming environment and two simulators support software development. Creating a moderately competent player is within the reach of a two student team in couple of weeks and is suitable as a practical semester assignment in an embedded systems programming, control or computational intelligence course.

For help on how to get started in Khepera robot soccer read the

Beginners Guide to Khepera Robot Soccer by Narongdech Keeratipranon, Joaquin Sitte and Frederic Maire (download pdf)