Embedded Vision Module for Robot-soccer
Andrzej Stefan Sluzek, P.K.D. Minh · IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications, 2006. · 2006
We report development of a hardware accelerator for robot-soccer systems equipped with global vision. An FPGA-embedded preprocessor captures individual video frames and detects colour blobs (corresponding to the ball and the players). The numerical characteristics of the blobs (colour, size and location) are sent to the host computer so that the current game configuration can be immediately identified by the computer. By exploiting parallelism and pipelining techniques available in the FPGA, a real-time performance has been achieved at rates higher than TV standards. The prototype implementation of the module (using Celoxica™ RC203 board with Virtex II FPGA) is able to process frames and to transfer results to the host computer at over 50 frames per second rate. A software module (Visual C++, Windows® XP platform) run be the host computer is used to interface the vision hardware, and to analyze and visualize the current game configuration.