Azzurra Robot Team (ART) is the National Italian Team for F-2000 RoboCup league, developed within the RoboCup Italia project. ART99 is formed by six academic groups and Consorzio Padova Ricerche. ART started with RoboCup-98, and its goal is to exploit the expertise and ideas from all groups in order to build a team where players have different features (hw and sw), but retain the ability to coordinate their behaviour within the team. ART99 obtained the second place in RoboCup-99 F-2000 league, and coordination among players is, in our view, the most significant achievement of the team.

Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain that can be used to explore new problems and test new techniques/solutions in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Robotics, as well as for training and educational purposes.

The authors describe simple effective communication software that provides a set of portable high-level primitives through which internal processes in any subsystem can interact in a uniform way, independently of the system configuration. Three forms of interprocess communications are provided: asynchronous send, in which the sending process does not wait; synchronous send, in which the process that sends a message is forced to wait until it is received by the destination process; and remote procedure call, in which a rendezvous between the caller and the acceptor takes place. The communication software is organized as a set of service processes that relies only on two low-level functions. The package has been made available on a number of different systems. Tests have been made on several network configurations. The organization of the communication software and the features that make it portable and suitable for real-time applications are described

The paper presents a programming environment for robotics based on a threaded code architecture. The environment is supported by a multiprocessing operating system and in-cludes a programming language, an interactive interpreter, a debugger, and a multi-window manager. The paper illustrates how the threaded code organization on which the system is based has proved beneficial in obtaining a good integration of the programming tools.

To hold the absolute maximum value of a physical quantity and to follow its increments, if any, is of interest in several measuring and control applications. A digital device, which accomplishes a solution of this problem, is presented. The design resorts to sequential machine techniques and makes possible the utilization of usual MSI counters.

A model is proposed to describe the early thyroxine distribution in man. The four main compartments, plasma, liver, interstitial fluids and other tissues, are characterized by their transfer rate constants and by their distribution spaces.