The soccer robots of the Dutch Team Tech United Eindhoven won the RoboCup German Open in Hanover, Germany. In the finals it took a penalty shoot-out to beat the current number three in the world ranking, the CoPS Team from Stuttgart. The Tech United Robots use EtherCAT for interfacing to drives, sensors and actuators.
The goal of the RoboCup project is to develop a team of autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer
Six Players form a team in the Middle Size League, the largest and fastest division in the RoboCup competition, top speed is approximately 4 m/s. Each of the three-wheeled robots weighs around 35 kg and acts autonomously without remote control. The robots have different roles such as goalkeeper, defender or striker and cooperate with each other in a team effort. Communication with the other team members is established through wireless Ethernet. Vision is provided by a camera pointing upwards towards a parabolic mirror creating a 360° view of the surroundings, using this image the robot is able to determine its position. The kicking mechanism can produce flat shots as well as lob shots – a feature that proved to be very effective in the final. The robot controller is a mini PC with an EtherCAT Open Source master. EtherCAT was chosen for its superior performance at low CPU load while not requiring any hardware extensions on the mini PC. Furthermore, it was easy to implement and all devices and components were available.
RoboCup is an international joint project to promote artificial intelligence (AI), mobile robotics, and related fields.
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