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RoboCup Technology
Hardware
The Robot
Five of these robots participate in a usual RoboCup game. They have been completely designed + manufactured by Mike.
- Omni directional propulsion
Our robots feature an omni directional drive system with custom made wheels (each containing 15 perpendicular mini-rollers). For propulsion we use high torque brushless motors with encoders. We control them with help of an FPGA.
- Rate Gyro Drive Stabilization
As a new feature in 2005, our robots take an active part in performing corrections to the drive system. This new system always makes the robot maintain the desired heading and accommodates for any unusual drive behavior such as wheel slippage. This allows us to drive safely at extremely high velocities, even under latency effects.
- A high-voltage solenoid-based kicking mechanism
The robot's kicker is powered by a solenoid which can be charged close to 200V. It allows the robot to shoot the ball at variable levels - from very soft - to extremely fast. Also, it features an infrared barrier which detects whether the ball is currently touching the kicker.
- A high-performance dribbler bar.
This bar rotates at a very high velocity and is covered with custom made rubber so the ball literally sticks to the robot.
Software
Our software was written completely from scratch by Stefan in C++ under Linux.
It consists of the following major components:
Vision System
The vision systems are the "eyes" of our robot. It features two overhead cameras which are connected to an external PC.
- Fast color segmentation with lighting adaptive blob-expansion.
Helps to analyze the color-patterns on the robots very quickly.
- Precise and reliable 3D camera calibration.
Allows to mount our cameras virtually anywhere above the field at any given angle.
- HSV based, graphical color table calibration.
Artificial Intelligence
- A Kalman filtered world-model with linear physical predictions.
This system attempts to eliminate sensory noise and will estimate the current state of the world by predicting linear motions of objects.
- A new kind of dynamically assignable, hierarchical multi-robot behaviors (tactics-tree).
Our intelligence is distributed tree-like into logical behavior groupings. Intelligent statistical evaluation functions are used for automatic behavior assignment and possibly adaptation to our opponent.
- An advanced 3D GUI with full debugging capabilities.
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