Alternative lighting design for robot soccer: Reflective lighting

A good light intensity distribution on the surface of robot soccer field is crucial to obtain an optimum robot soccer vision system calibration. Any decrement in light intensity will affect the overall performance of the robots during the match. In any robot soccer match, it is known that, the field edges always receive uneven lighting intensity. This is due to the poor design and unsuitable location of lighting system armature. The aim of this research is to develop an enhanced version armature with the help of wide-angle parabolic aluminium reflector. The comparison between the lux value and the robot recognition rate generated by both the normal and enhanced lighting system will be analysed. The SPSS (ver. 17.0) program is used to analyse the significance of the results produced by both lighting systems. The results show that the enhanced lighting system had significantly increased the average lux value across the field and the average robot detection rate with 0.05 significance level. This also demonstrates that the robot soccer lighting system can be enhanced by using a cheap material such as in the proposed design.