Reactive behaviours and agent architecture for Sony legged robots to play football

It has been an ultimate long-term dream in robotics and AI fields to build robotic systems with life-like appearance, behaviours and intelligence, reflected by many science fiction books and films. This is also an extremely challenging task. This paper introduces our current research efforts to build a multi-agent system for cooperation and learning of multiple life-like robots in the RoboCup domain. A behaviour-based hierarchy is proposed for the Essex Rovers robot football team to achieve intelligent actions in real time, which includes both a neural network-based color detection algorithm and a fuzzy logic controller. Preliminary results based on legged locomotion experiments of Sony walking robots are presented.