Patriarcas/Minho football team

Abstract

Autonomous mobile robots are ever increasing their num ber of di erent applications even in ludic application or in sports In the last few years several competitions of football have been organised with lots of teams participating This paper describes an Autonomous Mobile Robot which plays football and it was developed at the Industrial Electronics Engi neering department of the University of Minho in Guimares Portugal Each team is free to solve on his own way all the di erent electronics sensory systems playing algorithms etc as far as they cope with the rules imposed by the organisation Instead of using several di erent sensors increasing electronics complexity it was decided to use only one major sensor namely a vision system with the use of a colour camera All the image processing algorithms were developed from scratch and are hereby described . This vi sion system uses an innovative approach In order to see the whole field a convex mirror was placed on the top of the robot looking downwards with the video camera looking upwards towards the mirror This way the robot can see both goals the ball and other robots almost all the time as well as having a top view .