Robocup is an international robot soccer tournament. We have six mid-sized robots which can act autonomously, obey the referee and most importantly take on other world class robot soccer teams. They use a webcam for vision, a laptop for "thinking", motors for driving and kicking and some electronics to connect it all up.

Making machines play soccer involves software, hardware, signal processing and control. We have nine students currently working on these aspects of robot soccer. In July, a few students even travelled with the robots to the tournament in Japan. Robocup is a long running university project. To learn more come to the Robocup display and play soccer against a robot!

Management: Daniel Taft and Asela Silva

Managing the 2005 robocup team is like managing a real international sports team, except of course we supply electrons rather than oranges. It's true, we did build hardware peripherals such as battery chargers. In general, however, management is the handling of complexity. So what does managing a team of both robots and students actually entail? In our case it involved coordinating machines to play soccer for an international tournament.

We used project management techniques to coordinate the project and to integrate sub-projects from six other students into a working structure. We also prepared qualification materials, sought sponsorship and arranged travel for robots who won't fly economy.

Vision and localisation: Tony Chang and Jim Ko Kicker

The vision system is based around an omnidirctional mirror and camera setup. Images are extracted from the camera to a laptop where each pixel is processed. A single pixel of colour is divided into its chromatic scheme (YUV colours). This information is then collated to form objects like the soccer ball, goals or beacons. At the higher levels, the system can utilise such information to calculate the robots own position. This procedure is known as self-localisation and it enables the robot to coordinate tactical movement plans on the field.

Software: George Yu and Peter Deayton

The Robocup software group is responsible for three main components:
the coach program (which passes on commands from the referee), the robot software (which interprets data and determines the appropriate course of action), and the microcontroller code (which controls the physical devices connected to the robot).

The aim of the project is to create a structured software platform for the robots to function autonomously, with the only user input being commands from the referee. The major features of the project include artificial intelligence, communications and coordination, control theory, and software design.

Sensor and microcontroller: Julius Lim, Jason Valente Jacqueline Tan