"5dpo Robotic Soccer Team for Year 2004"

Abstract

The design of a Robotic soccer Team is an evolving process where the weaknesses and strengths of previous years drive the new enhancements. Also, the inevitable rule changes take an important role on design. The 5dpo team kept last year omni-directional robots. The robots have a controlled force Electromagnetic passing/kicking mechanism. The vision system is Linux based and uses two Firewire cameras to achieve better resolution and reduce system lag. This setup eliminates previous issues of control degradations caused by non-synchronisation of frames and noisy images. Team strategy is based on a hierarchical three level state machine. A dynamics prediction layer, based on a Kalman Filter, uses the ball and robots dynamics to predict the state at the time when the low level commands are executed thus improving the team performance.