Our First Robot Soccer Player : Pele 2

This project evolved from the desire to create a robot which could be used in the international Robosoccer Competition. The goal is to build a team of robots for playing soccer on a specialized playing field. We have built a platform and the necessary hardware for communication and control. Since vision forms the primary sensor, we have written the necessary software to serve for ball detection, robot detection and the virtual boundary detection. Upon assembling our first prototype (Pele 2), we tested the vision and control algorithms. During the test the robot chased a ball while staying within the virtual boundary. The response of Pele2 to the vision-control algorithm was fairly smooth. The next steps are to add a kicking mechanism and build Pele3, a teammate for Pele2.