Five Years of SSL-Vision - Impact and Development

Since its start in 1997, the setup of the RoboCup Small Size Robot League (SSL) enabled teams to use their own cameras and vision algorithms. In the fast and highly dynamic SSL environment, researchers achieved significant algorithmic advances in real-time complex coloredpattern based perception. Some teams reached, published, and shared effective solutions, but for new teams, vision processing has still been a heavy investment. In addition, it became an organizational burden to handle the multiple cameras from all the teams. Therefore, in 2008, the league started the development of a centralized, shared vision system, called SSL-Vision, which would be provided for all teams. In this paper, we discuss this system’s successful implementation in SSL itself, but also beyond it in other domains. SSL-Vision is an open source system available to any researcher interested in processing colored patterns from static cameras.