Using Collision Avoidance Algorithms for Designing Multi-robot Emergent Behaviors

We discuss how to induce a set of collective emergent behaviors into a team of real robots used for soccer robotics. The activation of robot behaviors is organized according to a multi-level control architecture. The emergent cooperative abilities, like exchanging a ball, are achieved through the use of efficient collision avoidance algorithms implemented by a small set of robots able to frequently swap their roles. Our algorithms have been tested on a couple of real robots, Bart and Homer, which played the final game with the middle size league, at RoboCup'99, in Stockholm. This approach can be generalized to allow multi-robot systems to perform various kind of collective tasks in the entertainment field.