A Multi-Agent System for a Robotic Table Soccer Game

The paper describes a demo application, that is going to be developed by our research group in collaboration with STMicroelectronics, that consists of a robotic table soccer game aimed at letting a human play soccer against an electronic system. The main feature of the system is that it is entirely composed of boards equipped with microcontrollers (rather than complete PCs) and thus it is demonstration of how a complete intelligent/robotic application can be implemented with such kind of devices. The system is composed of mechanical, electronics and software parts and has been designed ad-hoc to meet the requirements of a table soccer game. A vision system is employed to recognise and track the ball, while a set of eight BLDC (brushless) motors are used to drive the translation and rotation of the poles. The overall system is controlled by a set of interacting agents that, altogether, implement the intelligence driving the playing strategy of the robotic opponent. The paper describes the complete hardware/software system also providing some performance data that help to understand the effectiveness of the designed application.