A Description of the rUNSWift 2003 Legged Robot Soccer Team

Abstract

This paper describes the 2003 world champion legged robot soccer team, rUNSWift. The 2003 rUNSWift team is enhanced in a num- ber of ways over previous teams; both long and short range collabo- ration between team members was carefully crafted, a new method of ball localization was used when the ball was close, new tools were de- veloped for developing filters for objects returned by the vision code, self-localization was simplified, opponent localization was significantly improved with distributed data fusion, ball tracking was improved to account for the ball's velocity, edges and lines on the field were used to assist in self-localization, and automatic gait optimization was used to improve the forward walking speed of the robots. The result of these changes is a team that is significantly improved over previous teams.