In most behavior-based approaches, implementing a broad set of different behavioral skills and coordinating them to achieve coherent complex behavior is an error-prone and very tedious task. Concepts for organizing reactive behavior in a hierarchical manner are rarely found in behavior-based approaches, and there is no widely accepted approach for creating such behavior hierarchies. Most applications of behavior-based concepts use only few behaviors and do not seem to scale well. Reuse of behaviors for different application scenarios or even on different robots is very rare, and the integration of behavior-based approaches with planning is unsolved. This paper discusses the design, implementation, and performance of a behavior framework that addresses some of these issues within the context of behavior-based and hybrid robot control architectures. The approach presents a step towards more systematic software engineering of behavior-based robot systems.

The ability to autonomously adapt to variations in the environmental conditions is a very useful feature for mobile robots. Of particular interest in robotic soccer are self-calibrating vision systems that automatically adapt to local lighting conditions. The paper presents a method for autonomous calibration of a color classificator used for color blob-based image segmentation and landmark and object recognition. The experimental results demonstrate significantly improved robustness of visual processing.

Developing software for mobile robot applications is a tedious and error-prone task. Modern mobile robot systems are distributed systems, and their designs exhibit large heterogeneity in terms of hardware, operating systems, communications protocols, and programming languages. Vendor-provided programming environments have not kept pace with recent developments in software technology. Also, standardized modules for certain robot functionalities are beginning to emerge. Furthermore, the seamless integration of mobile robot applications into enterprise information processing systems is mostly an open problem. We suggest the construction and use of object-oriented robot middleware to make the development of mobile robot applications easier and faster, and to foster portability and maintainability of robot software. With Miro, we present such a middleware, which meets the aforementioned requirements and has been ported to three different mobile platforms with little effort. Miro also provides generic abstract services like localization or behavior engines, which can be applied on different robot platforms with virtually no modifications.