Using a Robot Coach to direct a Robot Player’s behavior on the field

In the Robot Soccer domain of RoboCup, a coach robot is allowed to provide strategic information to its team mates from the sidelines. To explore the possibilities and reliability of using a robot coach from a vision and localization perspective, our project looks at the ways to aid a robot player on the field. For the scope of the project, we restrict to oneway communication in the form of UDP packets from the coach to a single player on the field. We analyse aspects of robot detection and ball detection from the coach’s view (fixed position above the ground), directing a player towards a ball obstructed from the player’s view and qualitatively explore methods for localization of the robot player on the field using the coach. Detection of ball and robot player are shown to be reliable though distance measures from the coach’s perspective are not very reliable, especially due to motion blur as the coach robot explores the field. Probabilistic approaches to account for inaccuracies in vision based distances will be relevant to explore the limits of a coach’s use in directing a robot player on the field effectively.