RoboCup Jr. with LEGO MINDSTORMS

Abstract

During RoboCup'99 in Stockholm, we arranged the first RoboCup Jr. Here, the aim was to allow children hands-on experience with robotics, and for this purpose we set up a LEGO MINDSTORMS robot soccer game for children. We developed the user-guided behaviour-based approach in order to allow non-expert users to develop their own robots in an easy and fast manner. Indeed, using this approach, children of the age 7-14 were able to develop their own LEGO MINDSTORMS robot soccer players to play in nice and friendly tournaments with 60-90 minutes of development time! In a user-guided behavior-based system, it is the system developer who takes care of the difficult robotic problems, while the end-user is working on a higher abstraction level by making the coordination of primitive behaviors. Further, for the LEGO MINDSTORMS RoboCup Jr. game, we developed a field and a smart ball which allowed easy navigation and detection.