Footballer autonomous mobile robot: control and vision system

Abstract

This paper describes an Autonomous Mobile Robot which plays football. This project was developed by three senior students from the Industrial Electronics Engineering course during their probation period. The rules dictated the same structure for every team but then each team would solve, develop and use different electronics, sensory systems, play algorithms, etc. This robot uses one major sensor which is a vision system with the use of a colour camera. All the image processing algorithms used by the robot were developed and are hereby described. This robot uses also an innovative approach to see the whole football field (or most of it) at any time. A convex mirror was placed on the top of the robot looking downwards and the video camera looks at it. This way, the robot can see both goals, the ball and other robots, all the time. This idea proved to be very usefull for this type of application. This paper describes all the image processing and control software made specially for it.