UAVision: A modular time-constrained vision library for soccer robots

Abstract

The game of soccer is one of the main focuses of the RoboCup competitions, being a fun and entertaining research environment for the development of autonomous multi-agent cooperative systems. For an autonomous robot to be able to play soccer, first it has to perceive the surrounding world and extract only the relevant information in the game context. Therefore, the vision system of a robotic soccer player is probably the most important sensorial element, on which the acting of the robot is fully based. In this paper we present a new modular time-constrained vision library, named UAVision, that allows the use of video sensors up to a frame rate of 50 fps in full resolution and provides accurate results in terms of detection of the objects of interest for a robot playing soccer.