Robot Football Team from Minho University

This paper describes an Autonomous Mobile Robot team which plays football, developed by the Group of Automation and Robotics at the Industrial Electronics department of the University of Minho, in Guimarães (Portugal). In this competition each team is free to use and/or build all the different electronics, sensory systems, playing algorithms, etc. as far as they cope with the rules imposed by the organisation. Instead of using several different sensors increasing electronics complexity, this team decided to use only one major sensor: a vision system with a small colour camera. All the image processing algorithms were developed from scratch and they consist on the heart of the whole project. This vision system uses an innovative approach: in order to see the whole field, a convex mirror was placed at the top of the robot looking downwards with the video camera looking upwards towards the mirror. This way, the robot can see all around itself with a top view, which means continuous vision of the ball, goals and other robots.