Reactive behaviours and agent architecture for Sony legged robots to play football

It has been an ultimate long‐term dream in robotics and AI fields to build robotic systems with life‐like appearance, behaviours and intelligence, reflected by many science fiction books and films. This is also an extremely challenging task. This paper introduces our current research efforts to build a multi‐agent system for cooperation and learning of multiple life‐like robots in the RoboCup domain. A behaviour‐based hierarchy is proposed for the Essex Rovers robot football team to achieve intelligent actions in real time, which includes both a neural network‐based color detection algorithm and a fuzzy logic controller. Preliminary results based on legged locomotion experiments of Sony walking robots are presented.