Workshop

 

Programming for Autonomous Vision based Robot Soccer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           Joaquin Sitte                                                                                   Ulf Witkowski              

           Queensland University of Technology                                                 South Westphalia University of Applied Science

           Australia                                                                                         Germany

 

Abstract:  The purpose of this full day workshop is to initiate prospective participants in future robot soccer tournaments to the new AMiRoSoT (Autonomous Minirobot Soccer Tournament) league. Robot soccer games in the AMiRoSoT league are played with autonomous mini robots of at most 110 mm in diameter on a 2 m by 1.4 m play field. The main sensor modality is vision. Games may be played with 1, 3 or 5 robots per team. 

   This workshop uses soccer robots that have a smart phone as their main computer and the video camera on the smart phone provides the on-board vision capability for the autonomous soccer player.  Smart phone technology makes it possible to build small size, low cost autonomous vision based mobile robots.  The Zorro soccer robots used in this workshop use an Android smart phone mounted on a custom made mobility base.  The mobile base connects as an USB device for the phone.  

   The workshop consists of two three hour sessions and starts with a 45 min introduction to the AMiRoSoT league, the details of the rules and their motivation, and the special challenges arising from the specification and rules. Thereafter the Zorro soccer robot will be described from the point of view of the programmer.  Once the programming environment is set up and explained participants will learn how to write some basic vision based soccer playing behaviour programs using the OpenCV library for image processing. No previous knowledge of Android programming is required although familiarity with object oriented programming and the Java programming language will be an advantage. 

   To benefit from the material presented in the workshop only elementary knowledge of embedded computing hardware, actuators and sensors is required from the participants. 

   Participants need to bring their own laptop computer for writing and compiling the robot behaviour programs.  The Android Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is free and can be installed at the beginning the workshop. The programs will be downloaded to Zorro robots provided by the workshop organizers for testing.

 

Keywords: autonomous robots, vision based navigation, Android programming, robot soccer 

URL related to the workshop: www.amiresymposia.org