Mobile robots playing soccer

Robot soccer is a game similar to the "classical" soccer, but the players are robots. Each team consists of three players, one of them is the goalkeeper. Robots have to be controlled remotely from the host computer. The color camera connected to the computer is used for gaining information about the position of individual players and the orange golf ball. The match between two teams (each having its own camera and computer) is running without human intervention, with the exception of foul or stalemate situations, when the game is interrupted and a standard situation, such as free kick or penalty kick is called. The paper discusses micro robot control electronics based on a single-chip microcontroller with specialized DC motor controllers. Algorithms for fast image processing and object recognition are presented. A real time vector field based path planning for attack and defense robot is described. Artificial intelligence is realized using the decision tree algorithm.