Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Robust Vision for Robot Soccer
Benjamin Brown
Abstract:
This thesis describes the design and implementation of a global vision system for robot
soccer. This system was designed for use with the University of Queensland's team,
the RoboRoos, in the 1999
Robot Soccer World Cup. Although functional,
previous attempts at solving the robot soccer vision problem have lacked robustness,
being overly sensitive to changes in environmental lighting conditions. Many of these
attempts also made use of a tracking based solution, which left them prone to
non-recoverable fault conditions caused by the loss of a robot's identity.
The global vision system works in two parts. The first of these sections is
responsible for segmenting the robots and the ball from the background field. This
segmentation is achieved by first determining which parts of the RGB colour space
correspond to field green, and then performing a thresholding algorithm based on this
information. Noise is then removed from the thresholded image, and objects are formed
using a standard region-growing algorithm. Once the robots and the ball have been
isolated from the background field, information can be extracted about them. The object
recognition section of the system uses template matching and a unique method of encoding
information in markings on the top of each robot to determine the orientations and
identities of each of the RoboRoos.
The final vision system was able to provide all information required, and to operate
in a manner that ensured the reliability, accuracy and speed of the information. The
system also proved robust to changes in lighting and to fault conditions. This assessment
was confirmed by the strong performance of the global vision system in the RoboCup '99
competition.
Complete thesis:
thesis.pdf
Appendix A - Official RoboCup Rules
appendix_a.pdf
Appendix B - Global Vision System Source Code
appendix_b.pdf
Source Code:
code
A two-page conference paper which captures the relevant and interesting results
from the project:
conference_paper.pdf
A six-page conference paper submitted by
Dr Gordon Wyeth and Ben Brown to the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation - 2000:
icra_paper.pdf
About the Author
Dept of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
last mod 14/10/99