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Event-based automated refereeing for robot soccer

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Abstract

The RoboCup Small Size League (SSL) is a robot soccer game with robots that play on a customized field with overhead cameras. The majority of the research effort to date has been on the performance of the autonomous teams in aspects of motion planning and team strategy. However, another critical component of a robot game is the referee. In current SSL games, refereeing is done by humans, who use a “referee box” that passes their calls to the robots. In this work, we contribute an automated referee (autoref) for SSL games, towards enabling games to proceed with little or no human supervision. The goal is to move closer to the eventual full automation of complete games with real robots. The technical challenges include the clear definition of the rules of the game in terms of features to be extracted from the visual perception, temporal sequencing, and corresponding calls and game management. We provide a description of a game of SSL as it is relevant to an autoref, by categorizing the rules of the game and presenting the structure of a game as a hybrid automaton. We then describe the complete autoref using a modular event-based architecture, following up on the automaton as a guideline, to keep track of the state of a game and issue referee commands accordingly. We present the results of using our autoref to referee games on real robots, as well as a comparison of the events detected by the autoref to the calls made by a human referee during the real SSL games at RoboCup 2014.

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Notes

  1. http://simspark.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=Soccer_Simulation&oldid=3043.

  2. http://robocupssl.cpe.ku.ac.th/robocup2014:technical_challenges.

  3. https://github.com/robotics-erlangen/autoref.

  4. https://code.google.com/p/ssl-autonomous-refbox.

  5. http://www.robocup.org/about-robocup/objective/.

  6. We thank Mike Licitra for the mechanical design of the robots and for the design and fabrication of the robot electronics.

  7. https://developer.nvidia.com/physx.

  8. http://robocupssl.cpe.ku.ac.th/referee:protocol.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15232, USA

    Danny Zhu & Manuela Veloso

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  1. Danny Zhu
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  2. Manuela Veloso
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Correspondence to Danny Zhu.

Appendices

Appendix: Source code

Source code for our implementation of the system described here may be found at https://github.com/dzhu/ssl-autoref.

Appendix: Transition tables

Tables 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 include the full details of the transitions between the locations shown in Fig. 6. Each table describes the set of transitions associated with one of the pairs of locations (i.e., one of the edges in the diagram). The first column of each table describes the conditions under which that transition occurs; the second indicates the command that is transmitted when it occurs; the third indicates the changes that are made to the variables of the hybrid automaton when the transition occurs. A dash in the first column indicates that the transition is always immediately taken when the automaton is in the originating location of the edge (this only occurs for the transition out of the INIT location).

Table 19 SETUP to GAME_OFF transitions
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Zhu, D., Veloso, M. Event-based automated refereeing for robot soccer. Auton Robot 41, 1463–1485 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-016-9607-8

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