a visual compass for robot soccer

A Visual Compass for Robot SoccerFinal Year ProjectFinal Presentation

Student: Adil Mahmood

Supervisor: Dr John McDonald

What is RoboCup

•RoboCup is an annual international robotics soccer competition founded in 1997.

•The official goal of the RoboCup: robots that are capable of beating the FIFA World Cup winning team by 2050.

•RoboEireann, Maynooth’s RoboCup team, have competed in the Standard Platform League (SPL) since 2008.

Overview of Background

Mobile robot localisation can be separated into two separate problems, Local localisation (a.k.a. incremental

localisation) the robot has an initial estimate of its pose

Global localisation (a.k.a. kidnapped robot)

robot doesn’t have initial position information

Estimated line

Real Pose

Estimated Pose

Real line

Loop closure correction

Local Localisation

Global LocalisationWhere I’m? Which

direction I’m facing?

Research Questions

Is visual compass effective to find the direction of robot is currently looking?

What is the measurement of success?

Goals of Project

Develop a visual compass for global localisationImages of visual appearance of fixed objects

surrounding the pitch (or potential above the pitch) construct a panorama

using a sequence of imagesmatch query image to the panorama

detect features and matched features.Compute the direction of robot

Approach to GoalsBuild a visual map

using OpenCV and SURF algorithms

Visual map represent 360°

find the direction the robot is currently looking.

Visual Compass

Visual Compass

Visual Compass0 360199

Final Application: Screenshot

ImplementationsQt Creator, OpenCV, C++Algirithm

images

Stitching pipeline Panorama Query image

Load into Qt

DetectorDescriptor

Draw keypoint

Distance between keypoint

Good matches

Create, save histogram

array

Direction

Visual Compass

Experimental ResultsSURF ±18 % and SIFT ±29 % of

errorReason for large number of error?

Experimental Results

Weakness in technique

image29 image30 image35

Conclusions & Future Work

Developed prototype desktop visual compass application

Evaluated on real image dataset Problems Encountered

Ubuntu OS troubleshooting, QT toolkit, and OpenCV libraries

Design the GUI application in QTCreating a histogram

Future Work: Port to Nao robot.

Possible Solution to reduce the error

Create a visual map from different position of pitch

A Visual Compass for Robot Soccer