OCTOBER 3, 2007--At the RoboCup 2007 held in Atlanta, GA, USA, from July 1 to 8, the University of Freiburg, Germany, team won the soccer competitions in both classes of the Humanoid League, taking two championship titles. Featuring artificial eyes from the IDS Imaging Development Systems (Obersulm, Germany; www.ids-imaging.de) uEye camera series, machine vision laid the foundation for this success.
The successful robots have been developed by the Department of Computer Science of the University of Freiburg and use IDS cameras to emulate human eyesight. For this purpose each humanoid has three USB cameras from the uEye LE series, equipped with extremely wide-angle lenses to achieve the necessary all-round vision. The recorded images are transmitted via USB to a 1.3-GHz mini PC built into the robot's torso. There they are processed at a rate of 30 frames/s. From the image-analysis data and the signals of a tilt sensor, the computer decides the appropriate response behavior and controls the approximately 20 joints that are needed for the robot's running, kicking, and stand-up motions.
IDS has designed the uEye LE camera series with USB 2.0 interface to meet a wide range of applications. Various monochrome and color models with CMOS sensors and resolutions from 752 x 480 (WVGA) to 2560 x 1920 are available. They are provided either as board-level versions with or without lens adapter or as a version with a CE B certified plastic housing.
The RoboCup match can be watched on the project Web site at www.nimbro.net.
