This thesis investigates the design of a vision system for the “Guroo” a robot humanoid soccer player for use in object detection. The aim was to create a vision system that was able to view and track objects in the three dimensional world. Vision hardware is presented for the CMOS Digital Camera and Interface software for a field programmable gate array included on the main vision board. The design and implementation of an aesthetically pleasing head is also presented.
The objective of this thesis is to design a vision system for a humanoid robot so as to allow the robot to view a soccer ball in order to be involved in the RoboCup soccer tournament. This is only the beginning, vision systems of this design will allow humanoid robots to interact in increasingly complex situations with humans and the outside world.
The project has moved on from the development of the design of the original vision system for the “Viperoo” robot soccer team to designing a new system for the use in the Guroo project and the upgrade for the Viperoos small soccer league.
The major achievements in the redesign of the vision system are the use of the OV7620 CMOS digital camera chip which has trebled the frame rate of the digital camera used and the implementation of a dual port ram system for the field programmable gate array. These combine with the developments in the vision board to produce an improved local vision system. The result of this development was a camera that passed data from the three dimensional world surrounding it to the main vision board.
Future work on the design of a vision system will involve optimising the vision code and low level hardware code. Future students could also port areas of the object detection code to the field programmable gate array as another area of vision development.
Author: Andrew Blower
Source: University of Queensland