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Robocup 2010
Goal
The goal of this project is to strengthen UT Austin Villa's bid on the 2010 Robocup standard platform league in whatever way possible.
Results
UT Austin Villa placed 3rd overall in the SPL league and took 2nd place in the challenge events. More details here.
Primary Contributions
I was responsible for overseeing the 3 challenge events (passing, dribbling, and open challenges). This involved testing and tuning the code for each event after arriving in Singapore. Code for the Passing and Dribbling Challenges was written by Katie Genter. The Open challenge was a research demonstration of an autonomous camera calibration utility I had created for the team, which incidentally was my main contribution.
Camera Auto-Calibration Utility
This tool was created in order to reduce the amount of work required to use the Nao's top camera. The problem that we encountered was that by default the top camera perceived colors differently from the bottom camera even when given the same camera parameters (brightness, contrast, hue, etc). The most simple answer would be to create and tune a separate color table for the top camera of each robot, but this would require additional time and work before games. Instead, the Auto-Calibration utility performs a Hill Climbing search on the camera parameters of the top camera to find the best color match with the bottom camera.
This utility was used to tune the top camera parameters for all of the robots on the team. Ultimately the color match between the top and bottom cameras was quite good but still required minor tweaks before we reached competition level accuracy.
In general this utility can be used to tune any camera to match any other.
More information on this tool can be found in the associated report, slides, and video.