Obstacle and Game Element Detection with the 3D-Sensor Kinect

Detecting objects is of fundamental importance for the Eurobot Challenge 2011. This paper presents a Kinect-based approach to detect the game elements on the game field. Using the Kinect sensor provides the advantage that elements lying behind other elements can still be detected, which is nearly impossible for a laser-based approach. The Kinect provides depth information which is projected to the 3D space, building a point cloud of the game elements. The point cloud is then analyzed for the clusters of the game elements which are passed to a classifier each. The classifier decides if the passed-in cluster is a pawn, king or the enemy robot.