Topological Navigation in Configuration Space Applied to Soccer Robots

This paper describes a topological navigation system, based on the description of key-places by a reduced number of parameters that represent images associated to specific locations in configuration space, and the application of the developed system to robotic soccer, through the implementation of the developed algorithms to RoboCup Middle-Size League (MSL) robots, under the scope of the SocRob project (Soccer Robots or Society of Robots). A topological map is associated with a graph, where each node corresponds to a key-place. Using this approach, navigation is reduced to a graph path search. Principal Components Analysis was used to represent key-places from pre-acquired images and to recognize them at navigation time. The method revealed a promising performance navigating between key-places and proved to adapt to different graphs. Furthermore, it leads to a robot programming language based on qualitative descriptions of the target locations in configuration space (e.g., Near Blue Goal with the Goal on its Left). Simulation results of the method application are presented, using a realistic simulator.