Daniele Affinita

Vincenzo Suriani, Daniele Affinita, Domenico D. Bloisi et al.

Coordinating a fully distributed multi-agent system (MAS) can be challenging when the communication channel has very limited capabilities in terms of sending rate and packet payload. When the MAS has to deal with active obstacles in a highly partially observable environment, the communication channel acquires considerable relevance. In this paper, we present an approach to deal with task assignments in extremely active scenarios, where tasks need to be frequently reallocated among the agents participating in the coordination process. Inspired by market-based task assignments, we introduce a novel distributed coordination method to orchestrate autonomous agents' actions efficiently in low communication scenarios. In particular, our algorithm takes into account asymmetric obstacles. While in the real world, the majority of obstacles are asymmetric, they are usually treated as symmetric ones, thus limiting the applicability of existing methods. To summarize, the presented architecture is designed to tackle scenarios where the obstacles are active and asymmetric, the communication channel is poor and the environment is partially observable. Our approach has been validated in simulation and in the real world, using a team of NAO robots during official RoboCup competitions. Experimental results show a notable reduction in task overlaps in limited communication settings, with a decrease of 52% in the most frequent reallocated task.

Can Lin, Daniele Affinita, Marco E. P. Zimmatore et al.

Robust and accurate ball detection is a critical component for autonomous humanoid soccer robots, particularly in dynamic and challenging environments such as RoboCup outdoor fields. However, traditional supervised approaches require extensive manual annotation, which is costly and time-intensive. To overcome this problem, we present a self-supervised learning framework for domain-adaptive feature extraction to enhance ball detection performance. The proposed approach leverages a general-purpose pretrained model to generate pseudo-labels, which are then used in a suite of self-supervised pretext tasks -- including colorization, edge detection, and triplet loss -- to learn robust visual features without relying on manual annotations. Additionally, a model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) strategy is incorporated to ensure rapid adaptation to new deployment scenarios with minimal supervision. A new dataset comprising 10,000 labeled images from outdoor RoboCup SPL matches is introduced, used to validate the method, and made available to the community. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline outperforms baseline models in terms of accuracy, F1 score, and IoU, while also exhibiting faster convergence.

Filippo Ansalone, Flavio Maiorana, Daniele Affinita et al.

Advancing human-robot communication is crucial for autonomous systems operating in dynamic environments, where accurate real-time interpretation of human signals is essential. RoboCup provides a compelling scenario for testing these capabilities, requiring robots to understand referee gestures and whistle with minimal network reliance. Using the NAO robot platform, this study implements a two-stage pipeline for gesture recognition through keypoint extraction and classification, alongside continuous convolutional neural networks (CCNNs) for efficient whistle detection. The proposed approach enhances real-time human-robot interaction in a competitive setting like RoboCup, offering some tools to advance the development of autonomous systems capable of cooperating with humans.