ViperRoos: Developing a Low Cost Local Vision Team for the Small Size League

The development of cheap robot platforms with on-board vision remains one of the key challenges that robot builders have yet to surmount. This paper presents the prototype development of a low cost (<US$1000), on-board vision based, robot platform that participated in the small-size league in RoboCup’2000. The robot platform, named the VIPER robot, represents an integration of state of the art embedded technology to produce a robot that has reasonable computational abilities without compromising its size, cost or versatility. In this paper, we describe the hardware architecture of the system, its motivation through to its implementation. In addition, we reflect upon their performance at the competition as a measure of the robustness and versatility of the robot platform. Based on these reflections, we describe what remaining developments are required to evolve the system into a truly capable and versatile research platform.