Robot soccer as a culminating design project for undergraduates

Abstract

For the past four years, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at B W has sponsored a oneon-one robot soccer competition as one of several electives within the senior capstone design project. Teams of four students design and build autonomous robots that must fit within a seven inch cube. The soccer field is roughly the size of a ping-pong table and a golf ball is used as the soccer ball. An overhead camera provides sensory input for the robots. Much of the project involves the creation and debugging of software, ranging from image processing code to multi-level control software to allow precise movement and intelligent play. Using a custom simulator of the game environment, software is developed and tested in parallel with the creation of the robot hardware. This paper describes the complete program and explains how it has been tailored to become an exceptional capstone project for senior electrical and computer engineering students.Our solution has evolved into a one semester, four credit hour design course culminating in a one-on-one robot soccer competition held in a public venue. In order to design a robot that can successfully compete in robot soccer, students need to become at least somewhat familiar with a number of technical topics, including: mechanical design, microcontroller programming and interface, RF communication, signal conditioning, communication protocol development, software architectures, concurrent engineering, artificial intelligence, computer vision, system modeling, low-level control d-

Unmanned air vehicle testbed for cooperative control experiments

“…Over the past two years, BYU students have developed a small omnidirectional robot platform for research in robot soccer and capture the flag games [6], [7], [8]. A closeup view of the BYU omnidirectional robot is shown in Figure 2.…”