Motion Control in Dynamic Multi-Robot Environments

All mobile robots require some form of motion control in order to exhibit interesting autonomous behaviors. This is even more essential for multi-robot, highly-dynamic environments, such as robotic soccer. This paper presents the motion control system used by CMUnited-98, the small-size league champion at RoboCup-98. The team consists of five robots that aim at achieving specific goals while navigating in a limited space shared with the five other opponent robots. We introduce our motion control algorithm, which allows a general differential-driven robot to accurately reach a target point with a desired orientation in an environment with multiple moving obstacles. We describe how the features of our motion controller help to build interesting and robust behaviors. We also briefly compare our system to other motion control techniques and include descriptions and illustrations of the performance of our fully-implemented motion control algorithm.