The RoboFlag Competition

Raffaello D'Andrea and Richard M. Murray
2003 American Control Conference

RoboFlag is a robotic version of capture the flag that can be played either with autonomous controllers or with up to two humans in the loop. The goal of the game is to capture the flag of the other team, which is located in their defense zone, and bring it back to your home zone. The other team defends their flag by tagging your robots on their side of the field, at the same time as trying to capture your flag. Some of the interesting features of RoboFlag are that the robots have limited sensing capability and distributed processing, requiring that information be communicated between robots across limited bandwidth links. This makes the game much more challenging since you have two determine your actions without a complete view of the playing field.

This paper gives an overview of the RoboFlag competition and describes some of the research challenges that are represented in the game.

Conference Paper (PDF, 6 pages, 358K)
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