Recognition of Standard Platform RoboCup Goals

RoboCup provides a common research framework where a wide range of problems closely related to robotics and artificial intelligence must be addressed. The main focus of the RoboCup activities is competitive soccer. Thus, the visual identification of players and play-field components is a necessary task to be performed. In particular, goals are some of the key elements that should be identified by each player (robot). In this way, this paper introduces a fast and robust methodology based on Artificial Vision techniques for the recognition of the goals utilized in the RoboCup Standard Platform League. First, 2D images captured by the front camera mounted in the head of a Nao robot are used to recognize the goals through a color based geometrical segmentation method. Afterwards, the position of the robot with respect to the goal is calculated exploiting 3D geometric properties. The proposed system is validated with real images corresponding to the RoboCup2009 competition.