About RoboCup
is an international initiative that fosters research in robotics and artificial intelligence, on multi-robot systems in particular, through competitions of RoboCup Robot Soccer, RoboCup Rescue, RoboCup@Home, RoboCup Industrial, and RoboCupJunior.
About the Logistics League
The RoboCup Logistics League (RCLL) is a subleague of the RoboCup Industrial League. It focuses on in-factory logistics applications. Following the RoboCup spirit, this league’s objective is to enable scientific work in order to achieve a flexible solution of material and information flow within industrial production using coordinated teams of autonomous mobile robots.
In this league, the goal is for a team of robots to assemble products on demand, using a set of production machines. The machines are based on the MPS- Production System provided by Festo. There are different types of machines that resemble different production steps, for instance fetching raw material, assembling parts, or delivering final products. Overall, on a high-level, this culminates into an online, multi-agent planning and scheduling problem with uncertain execution behavior. In addition to tackling a complex high-level problem, teams need to set up and maintain a full robotics stack that can handle navigation, manipulation and perception.
Two teams share a common factory floor. Each team comprises up to three autonomous robots which can produce using seven machines. Each robot builds on the standardized Festo Robotino robot platform which can be extended individually with sensors and computing devices. The robots are cooperative in the sense that they need to communicate and to interact physically with the machines, e.g. fetching raw material from a dispenser machine or delivering intermediate products to machines that refine them.
A central agent (called Referee Box) randomly generates product orders with varying configurations and delivery windows. These orders are communicated to the robot teams that need to derive a production schedule and to distribute the tasks among the team robots. Hence the RCLL posts challenges in the full range from Mobile Robotics over communication and multi-agent systems to planning and scheduling.
See a video for a first impression.
Getting Started
If you are interested in tackling the challenges presented by our league, feel free to check out our getting-started repository, or contact the organizational committe via the OC mailing list: robocup-logistics@lists.rwth-aachen.de