Development of a Vision System for a Humanoid Robot

Student: Andrew Blower s353997@student.uq.edu.au

Supervisor: Dr. Gordon Wyeth

Category: Computer Systems Engineering Thesis Project

Abstract: This thesis investigates the design of a vision system for the "Guroo" a robot humanoid soccer player. The aim was to create a vision system that was able to view and track objects in the three dimensional world. Vision hardware is presented for the CMOS Digital Camera and Interface software for a field programmable gate array included on the main vision board. The design and implementation of an aesthetically pleasing head is also presented.

Beginning in 2000 the project has moved on from the development of the design of the original vision system for the "Viperoo" robot soccer team to designing a new system for the use in the Guroo project and the 2001 upgrade for the Viperoos small soccer league.

The major achievements in the redesign of the vision system are the use of the OV7620 CMOS digital camera chip which has trebled the frame rate of the digital camera used and the implementation of a dual port ram system for the field programmable gate array. These combine with the developments in the vision board to produce an improved local vision system.

This project has developed a successful dual port ram software interface and a new camera design for the vision systems of both the Guroo and Viperoo teams.

Future work on the development of this vision system will involve optimizing the vision code and low-level hardware code. Future students could also port areas of the object detection code to the field programmable gate array as another area of vision development.

Poster Presentation (PDF)

Thesis Document (PDF)