RoboCube a "universal" "special purpose" Hardware for the RoboCup small robots league

Andreas Birk, Holger Kenn, Thomas Walle

Abstract: This paper describes the RoboCube hardware which is conceptualized for robots competing in the small robots league of RoboCup, the Robot World Cup Soccer Initiative. One main goal of its architecture is to allow the on-board implementation of as many robot behaviors as possible. Therefore, RoboCube provides quite some computation power and memory within the space-constraints. In addition, RoboCube is layed out to deal with various sensors and motors, radio-communication, and the option of high-resolution on-board vision. RoboCube is adapted to the task of playing soccer with particular regulations, and therefore it is a kind of special-purpose solution, but it is flexible enough to cover a broad variety of potential player- and team-designs, and therefore it is a kind of universal solution.