Thu, 28 Jan 2010
RoboPatriots humanoid soccer players for RoboCup using Surveyor SVS Blackfin -



The Autonomous Robotics Laboratory of George Mason University has fielded a team, RoboPatriots, for the RoboCup humanoid league, a prestigious international autonomous robotic soccer competition. RoboPatriots is one of only two teams from the USA that competed in the RoboCup humanoid league in 2009 (of 24 teams overall). The team is small and has never received any outside funding, so one of their goals is to present an inexpensive and robust robot platform that still competes well. In comparison, their competitor's robots generally cost 4-5 times as much.

As the team prepares for next year's competition in Singapore, they are developing tools for humanoid motion and path planning, vision-based localization, and multiple-robot coordination, as well as physical simulation software. The Surveyor SVS (stereo vision system) has proven to be a critical part of their robot architecture, acting as the brains and eyes of the robots.

2010 Robot Specs:
  • Team Name: RoboPatriots (Johnny 5, Newton, and Stephanie)
  • Height: 53 cm
  • Weight: 900 grams
  • DOF: 18 (5 DOF per leg, 3 DOF per arm, 2 DOF neck)
  • Motors: Arms and Legs (16): Kondo KRS-2555HV digital servos
  • Motors: Neck (2): Kondo KRS-788HV ICS Digital Servos
  • Computing Unit: RCB-4 from Kondo
  • Camera: Surveyor SVS stereo vision system, 640x480 resolution per camera, two 500 MHz Blackfin processors
  • Sensors: (1) RAS-2 dual-axis accelerometer from Kondo (2) KRG-3 single axis gyro from Kondo
  • Walking Speed: 25 cm/s
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Posted Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:40 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...