ROBO - Autonomous Football Robot

Abstract

The autonomous football robot (ROBO) was designed to enhance the knowledge in the field of robotics and computer vision through the robot development. The goal was to learn the use of robotic kits, the Raspberry Pi micro-controller to control the robot motion, the Raspbian operating system (Linux based OS), the python programming language and the computer vision library (OpenCV). The robot design consists of hardware and software designs. For the robot hardware design and implementation, the robotic kit were built, tested, and attached to a 3D custom printing gripper and kicker along with the 180 degrees rotational Raspberry Pi camera by servo motor. Lastly, a small breadboard was attached to set up the pulse, voltage, and the ground for the servo motors. For the robot software design, there are two algorithms or modes in the program, ball mode and goal mode. The ball mode start with ball detection and end with the ball grab. The goal mode start with the goal search and end with kick the ball into the goal. A 150 experiments done for three different configuration of the robot. Each configuration consists of 50 experiments. The results were 2% task error for the first configuration, 10% for the second, and 22% for the third. The task errors were because of the mechanical failure of the kicker. The kicker was unable to reach the ball into the goal from far distance. A future work can be a better kicker with more power.