Led by Prof. Zhiqiang Zheng, our NuBot team was founded in 2004. Currently we have two full professors (Prof. Zhiqiang Zheng and Prof. Hui Zhang), one associate professor (Prof. Huimin Lu), one assistant professor (Dr. Junhao Xiao), and several graduate students. Till now, 8 team members have obtained their doctoral degree with the research on RoboCup Middle Size League (MSL), and more than 20 have obtained their master degrees. For more detail of each member please see NuBoters.
As shown in the figure below, five generations of robots have been created since 2004. We participated in RoboCup Simulation and Small Size League (SSL) initially. Since 2006, we have been participating in RoboCup MSL actively, e.g., we have been to Bremen, Germany (2006), Atlanta, USA (2007), Suzhou, China (2008), Graz, Austria (2009), Singapore (2010), Eindhoven, Netherlands (2013), Joao Pessoa, Brazil (2014), Hefei, China (2015), Leipzig Germany (2016), Nagoya Japan(2017), Montréal Canada(2018) and Sydney Australia(2019) . We have also been participating in RoboCup China Open since it was launched in 2006.
The NuBot robots have been employed not only for RoboCup, but also for other research as an ideal test bed more than robot soccer. As a result, we have published more than 70 journal papers and conference papers. For more detail please see the publication list. Our current research mainly focuses on multi-robot coordination, robust robot vision and formation control.
The following items are our team description papers (TDPs) which illustrates our research progress over the past years.
Supported by National University of Defense Technology, our team has designed the NuBot rescue robot from the mechanical structure to the electronic architecture and software system. Benefiting from the strong mechanical structure, our rescue robot has good mobility and is quite durable, so it will not be trapped even facing the highly cluttered and unstructured terrains in the urban search and rescue. The electronic architecture is built based on industrial standards which can bear electromagnetic interference and physical impact from the intensive tasks. The software system is developed upon the Robot Operating System (ROS). Based on self-developed programs and several basic open source packages provided in the ROS, we developed a complete software system including the localization, mapping, exploration, object recognition, etc. Our robot system has been successfully applied and tested in the RoboCup Rescue Robot League (RRL) competitions, where our rescue robot team entered the top 5 and won the Best in Class small robot mobility in 2016 RoboCup RRL Leipzig Germany, and won the champions of 2016 and 2017 RoboCup China Open RRL competitions.
The following pictures show that our rescue robot participated in RoboCup 2016 RRL competition.
