The team name ARAIBO comes of course from AIBO and ARAI, and means "Advanced Robots with Artificial Intelligence for Ball Operation".
AIBO could not play well last year, partly because it is difficult for AIBOs to measure the position of the ball precisely with a CCD camera, especially when the ball is very close to the body. By means of a learning system, all AIBOs aim to transform themselves to genuine strikers.
We store the data of both the observation before kicking and the motion of the kicked ball. Applying one of vector quantization algorithm to learn the relation between them, the kicking task is evaluated multi-dimensionally. A kick is scored not by true/false of the achievement of a 'goal', but by its direction and/or motion. The next action is inferred from the experience.
The strategy of the team ARAIBO must have Artificial Intelligence as the name is taken from. But, the motion planning of an individual robot is mainly based on the local information of the goals and the ball, obtained with the CCD camera. The robot stores the coarse information about the relative position of the goals and the ball against the robot. The information of "walking" is accumulated for dead reckoning and on the other hands the landmarks are utilized to enhance reckoning ability.
We wish that high ability of "Intelligent AIBO" can make us win the games easily.