Tech United soccer robot build from Lego Mindstorms

[Hanso]

In the Netherlands, in the last class of the secondary school, you have to write a study project (for the Dutch: "een profielwerkstuk"). My son (17) choose to build the soccer robot from the Eindhoven University. More information about the real robot can be found here: http://www.techunited.nl/en.

For the study project, my son wanted to know if it would be possible to build a single robot with the same functionality as the real one, meaning:

1. The robot should drive in any direction using omni wheels
2. The robot can see the ball
3. The robot can drive towards the ball
4. The robot can grab the ball
5. The robot can shoot the ball
6. The robot 'knows' its location on the playing field

The robot has been build by Lego Mindstorms, with a total of 4 EV3 bricks, 9 large motors for the movement of the robot, a Pixycam camera for the vision, 2 large motors for grabbing the ball and 2 medium motors for the shooting. A gyro sensor is used to make sure that the robot only makes one full turn (360 degrees) when it is searching for the ball. Apart from the Pixycam, everything is regular Lego.

The result of his study project is shown on the picture below. The robot is able to drive, locate the ball (it should be in a range of 2,5 meters otherwise the camera won't see it), drive to the ball using a simple PID control algorithm, grabs the ball and shoot the ball (if you click on the picture below you will be teleported to my Flickr page containing  more images of the robot):

 

Last Saterday, during the open house of his school, my son was invited to demonstrate the result of his study project to the visitors.

 

A small video of the robot during the demonstration can be viewed on my Youtube channel.

 

Please let me know what you think of his study project. And if there is more interest, I can post some more details.

Kind regards, Hans

Edited February 20, 2017 by Hanso