Introduction
Research on mobile robot platforms is receiving an increasing share of attention, especially in the area of household domestic appliances. The problems and challenges facing the development of these platforms are many, varied and often significantly different from the problems faced in both the smaller sized and humanoid leagues.
Compared to the smaller sized leagues, these robots are fully autonomous and this brings many challenges in the areas of hardware design, communication, co-operation, intelligence, and sense. While in comparison to the humanoid leagues, they have the flexibility to employ non-human like sensing and motion systems. This creates a much faster platform and this alone brings challenges in sensing, locating, and planning to the fore. It is our goal that the RoboSot competition will be a dynamic competition that continually shifts its goalposts from year to year to meet the problems and challenges that arise in this field. We also hope that competing teams will also find the challenges along this path both interesting and rewarding.
