The RoboCup-NAIST: A Cheap Multisensor-Based Mobile Robot with On-Line Visual Learning Capability

Our contribution is composed of two parts: one is development of a cheap multisensor-basedmobile robot, the other is development of robust visual tracking system with on-line visual learning capability. To promote robotic soccer research, we need a low cost and portable robot with some sensors and a communication device. To date, there is no platform for robotic soccer. Therefore, each researcher must build his own robots or utilize robots which are commercially available. This paper describes how to construct a robot system which includes a lightweight and low cost mobile robot with visual, tactile sensors, TCP/IP communication device, and portable PC where Linux is running. In real world, robust color segmentation is a tough problem because color signlas are very sensitive to the slight changes of lighting conditions. In order to keep visual tracking systems with color segmentation technique running in real environment, on-line learning method for acquiring models for image segmentation should be developed. In this paper, we also describe an on-line visual learning method for color image segmentation and object tracking in dynamic environment. An example of the developed soccer robot system and preliminary experimental results are also shown.