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Mon, 30 Oct 2006
RoboCup Soccer
One of our more interesting projects at the moment is a proposal to the RoboCup Federation for creation of a sub-league within the Small Size League for robotic players with on-board vision and autonomous control as an alternative to the current systems employing overhead "global vision" camera systems. It's a significant technical challenge, but there seems to be a lot of interest from other robot manufacturers in the same size class as the SRV-1, so we're trying to come up with a set of rules that would encourage broad-based industry participation.
We started doing some prototyping, and while it will take some time before we have fully functional 4 player vs 4 player game demonstration, the mechanical aspects are pretty simple. The idea is that we would try to engage participation from existing commercial off-the-shelf robots meeting the size constraints (robots fit within 180mm diameter cylinder) that use on-board cameras as their primary sensor with just the addition of a passive ball-handling fixture. We've already had some debate about whether to allow any off-board processing, as this would greatly simplify the programming task for many participants, and the current thought is that if we significantly limit the bandwidth of connections between the robots and their hosts (e.g. 100kbps per robot). Anyhow, here's an example of the proposed robot modification - it's quite simple and reasonably functional ...
The main challenge at this point in completing a proposal is to work out details of game play as they vary from the rules that apply to existing Small Size League competitions. Anyone interested in this concept, especially if you have first-hand experience with RoboCup competitions, is encouraged to contact us with comments / suggestions.
Posted Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:24 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...