noOS

September 2013 - July 2020

I joined the SFZ e.V. , an extracurricular research center for students, in September of 2013. Starting with a team of two we began to build a line following robot in order to compete in the RoboCup Junior Rescue Line league.
Looking for a new challenge I founded the noOS soccer team in 2016.
With a self designed robot out of wood based on three qfix controllerboards we took part in RoboCup Juniors Soccer 1 vs. 1 Open league. The goal is to design, build and program a fully autonomous mobile robot to compete against another team in soccer matches. The robots must detect an infrared emmiting ball and score into a goal on a special field that resembles a human soccer field.
You can find a video of the robots performance in 2017 at the bottom of the page.

After two years and with my new teammember Tobias Bungard it was once again time for a new challenge. Bringing together Tobias knowledge of Computer Vision and my experience with designing, building and programming soccer robots we decided to build two entirely new robots to take part in RoboCup Juniors Soccer Open league.

There are three new main challenges:

1. the ball is a passive, orange colored dog ball
2. there is ia white line around the field that robots are not allowed to cross
3. each team consists of two robots

To handle challenge 1 we needed Tobias knowledge in Computer Vision. He developed the ball recognition system in C++ with OpenCV on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B with the Raspberry Pi Camera Module 2.

In the meantime I got busy designing a custom printed circuit board (PCB) with two ARM® Cortex®-M3 processors, motor drivers and a sensor ring to detect the field outlines and deal with challenge 2 from above. It additionally includes a microSD card slot for data logging and a hardware based motor-encoder pre-processing to reduce the load on the CPU.

While designing new robots to make use of all our new custom hardware I also created a PCB for the user interface (UI) to interact with the robots settings.

Sadly after one year Tobias was already too old to compete in RoboCup Junior. His then student Frieder Lontzek took over Tobias responsibilities with the ball and goal detection.
In addition Frieder designed a rear view mirror to increase the robots field of view (FOV). He shares a few pictures about this process on his website.
As for my part we decided to keep the hardware changes minimal in order to focus on improving our software. The only add-on was a device commonly referred to as a "kicker". Most teams typically use a push-pull type solenoid actuator and apply to it a very high voltage for a short period of time in order to kick the ball. I developed a custom circuit and designed the PCB to provide the high voltage required to kick the ball with a sufficient force.

On the software side I developed a UI/Debugger for the robots on the .NET platform with Windows Forms in C#. The robots talked to the PC via a serial interface either over wire or Bluetooth. The code for this application is available on GitHub. The same is true for most of this projects code, 3D models and PCB schematics
Below you can see videos of the robots performance over the years.

Our newest video from the RoboCup Junior Southgerman Championship 2020 where we scored 3rd place:

And the video from the European Championship in 2019: