CMDragons 2009 Extended Team Description
Stefan Zickler, James Bruce, Joydeep Biswas,
Michael Licitra, and Manuela Veloso
Carnegie Mellon University
{
szickler,jbruce,veloso
}
@cs.cmu.edu
{
joydeep,mlicitra
}
@andrew.cmu.edu
Abstract.
In this paper we present an overview of CMDragons 2009,
Carnegie Mellon’s entry for the RoboCup Small Size League. Our team
builds upon the research and success of RoboCup entries in previous
years. Our team’s success can be contributed to a well-balanced combi-
nation of sophisticated robot hardware and a layered, intelligent software
architecture consisting of computer vision, multi-robot play selection, as
well as single robot tactics and navigation.
1
Introduction
Our RoboCup Small Size League entry, CMDragons 2009, builds upon the on-
going research used to create the previous CMDragons teams (1997-2003,2006-
2008) and CMRoboDragons joint team (2004, 2005). Our team entry consists of
five omni-directional robots controlled by an offboard computer. Sensing is pro-
vided by two overhead mounted cameras linked to the offboard computer. The
software then sends driving commands to the individual robots. This first half
of this paper describes the robot and vision hardware of the system. The second
half of this paper describes the overall architecture and individual components
of the offboard control software required to implement a robot soccer team.
2
Hardware
The modern Small Size League has brought along many challenging demands
on hardware. To perform well as a team, robots need to be reliable, fast, and
accurate in their actuations. Similarly, global vision sensing needs to not only
be low-latency, but also needs to have sufficient resolution to accurately localize
the robots and the ball on the relatively large field. This Section describes these
hardware components of our system.
2.1
Vision
In previous years, the CMDragons team has relied heavily on traditional off-the-
shelf camcorders in conjunction with low-cost capture cards as its vision system.
Our previous hardware delivered a 640
×
240 pixel video stream at 60Hz. The