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Robot Soccer Kit: Omniwheel Tracked Soccer Robots for Education

Gregoire Passault, Clement Gaspard, Olivier Ly

TL;DR

The paper addresses the limitation of educational robotics kits that rely on egocentric sensing by introducing the Robot Soccer Kit (RSK), which combines holonomic omnidirectional robots with an external vision tracking system to provide world-space localization and navigation capabilities. The approach centers on a centralized Game Controller API that coordinates robots, tracking, and user code, implemented on a compact 2.5×2 m field at roughly $1250 in cost. Key contributions include the hardware design of omnidirectional wheels and solenoid kickers, an ArUco-based vision system with homography mapping, a Python development environment, and a ladder of pedagogical sequences that teach geometry, control, and planning in a hands-on context. The work enables practical teaching of coordinates, trajectory planning, obstacle avoidance, and multi-robot strategies, while also supporting RoboCup-inspired competitions in schools and providing a platform for educational research and tool development.

Abstract

Recent developments of low cost off-the-shelf programmable components, their modularity, and also rapid prototyping made educational robotics flourish, as it is accessible in most schools today. They allow to illustrate and embody theoretical problems in practical and tangible applications, and gather multidisciplinary skills. They also give a rich natural context for project-oriented pedagogy. However, most current robot kits all are limited to egocentric aspect of the robots perception. This makes it difficult to access more high-level problems involving e.g. coordinates or navigation. In this paper we introduce an educational holonomous robot kit that comes with an external tracking system, which lightens the constraint on embedded systems, but allows in the same time to discover high-level aspects of robotics, otherwise unreachable.

Robot Soccer Kit: Omniwheel Tracked Soccer Robots for Education

TL;DR

The paper addresses the limitation of educational robotics kits that rely on egocentric sensing by introducing the Robot Soccer Kit (RSK), which combines holonomic omnidirectional robots with an external vision tracking system to provide world-space localization and navigation capabilities. The approach centers on a centralized Game Controller API that coordinates robots, tracking, and user code, implemented on a compact 2.5×2 m field at roughly $1250 in cost. Key contributions include the hardware design of omnidirectional wheels and solenoid kickers, an ArUco-based vision system with homography mapping, a Python development environment, and a ladder of pedagogical sequences that teach geometry, control, and planning in a hands-on context. The work enables practical teaching of coordinates, trajectory planning, obstacle avoidance, and multi-robot strategies, while also supporting RoboCup-inspired competitions in schools and providing a platform for educational research and tool development.

Abstract

Recent developments of low cost off-the-shelf programmable components, their modularity, and also rapid prototyping made educational robotics flourish, as it is accessible in most schools today. They allow to illustrate and embody theoretical problems in practical and tangible applications, and gather multidisciplinary skills. They also give a rich natural context for project-oriented pedagogy. However, most current robot kits all are limited to egocentric aspect of the robots perception. This makes it difficult to access more high-level problems involving e.g. coordinates or navigation. In this paper we introduce an educational holonomous robot kit that comes with an external tracking system, which lightens the constraint on embedded systems, but allows in the same time to discover high-level aspects of robotics, otherwise unreachable.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 21 sections, 9 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Architecture
  3. Overview
  4. Robots design
  5. Kickers
  6. Vision-based tracking
  7. Development environment
  8. Pedagogical sequences
  9. Given that the robot is at the center of the field, make it face the ball, using the "goto" primitive
  10. Given that the robot is at the center of the field, make it face the ball using rotational speed primitives
  11. Get the robot going toward the ball facing it, and kicking it
  12. Wherever the ball and the robots initially are, move the robot and make it kick so that it scores a goal in opponent goals using the "goto" primitive (implement an attacking robot)
  13. Knowing the position and orientation of opponent robot, place a goal so that it stops the ball (implement a goalee)
  14. Re-implement the "goto" primitive
  15. Create a model to estimate the future position of the ball when it comes to a stop
  16. ...and 6 more sections

Figures (9)

  • Figure 1: A packed and assembled overview of the kit.
  • Figure 2: Overview of the architecture
  • Figure 3: To kick the ball in the direction given by the arrow, an omnidirectional robot can perform an immediate translation, where its two-wheeled counterpart would require a complex maneuver.
  • Figure 4: An exploded view of the custom wheels
  • Figure 5: The result of detection system (processed at 30Hz) with live annotations.
  • ...and 4 more figures