The Robot Soccer World Cup (known as the RoboCup) Games and Conferences
are a series of competitions and events designed to promote the full
integration of AI and robotics research. Robotic soccer provides a good
test-bed for evaluation of various research, e.g. artificial
intelligence, robotics, image processing, system engineering and
multi-agent systems. In the Middle Size League (MSL) teams of fully
autonomous robots with a size of up to 50cm x 50cm x 80 cm play soccer
against each other. The MSL provides a serious challenge for many
research disciplines including multi-robot cooperative teams, autonomous
navigation, sensor fusion, vision-based perception, automatic reasoning,
and mechanical design, to name only a few. All these topics have to be
tackled in order to solve the RoboCup challenge. Therefore, RoboCup
needs truly interdisciplinary research. Furthermore, approaches
developed in the MSL will find their way to applications in other
domains like service robots. As mentioned above research in the field of
autonomous mobile robots is a very interdisciplinary and wide area.
Therefore, hardly any group is able to achieve high quality research in
all topics. Our group concentrates its work on flexible, symbol-based
and robust approaches for the control of autonomous mobile robots in a
wide area of domains and for various tasks. We subsume this under the
name "Robust Intelligent Control for Autonomous Systems". The main
research topics of our group are: robust abstarct control for mobile
robots, model-based diagnosis for
autonomous systems and sensor-based navigation.