TINYPHOON A Tiny Autonomous Mobile Robot

Abstract

In this paper the system architecture of a tiny autonomous mobile robot, called Tinyphoon, is described. The robot is a two wheeled differentially driven (2WDD) robot, which fits with all its components into a cube with an edge length of only 75mm. An outstanding feature is its high-speed onboard vision system comprising a small digital CMOS camera and a very fast and low power signal processing unit. Tinyphoon can not only be used as a soccer playing robot in the category MiroSOT, but also as a fully autonomous wireless-enabled robot for many different applications. I. INTRODUCTION Tinyphoon 1 is a two wheeled differentially driven (2WDD) robot, distinguished by its powerful, compact and modular architecture. It is the further development of Roby-Go (1). Unlike Roby-Go, Tinyphoon is able to act autonomous without any help of a host computer, as it is usual for soccer playing robots of the category MiroSOT. Robot soccer (2) was introduced in 1994 with the the- oretical background to develop multi-robot adaptive, co- operative, autonomous systems solving common tasks, a so-called Multi Agent System (MAS) (3). A group of robots must interact and self-organize in order to achieve the common given goal. For our project, other technical aspects beside the cooperative and coordinated behavior where the increase of local processing power while minia- turizing the system, a precise movement and an increased power efficiency. In robot soccer there are several leagues leagues differing in the size of the robots, the number of robots in a team and the system configuration. Generally speaking, regarding the division of labor be- tween the components of a soccer team, namely between the host computer system and the autonomous mobile robots, three system configurations are defined: • Remote brainless system In this configuration, an external workstation is used to process the data obtained from a vision system and to send the resulting commands to the different robots on the field. The robots just contain modules for propulsion, communication and controlling. • Vision-based system This system can be described as the step from the remote brainless to the robot-based system, as some of the intelligence is transferred from the main computer to the single agents, but the control of the vision system and the strategic coordination still remain tasks of the host unit. 1 http://www.tinyphoon.com • Robot-based system This configuration is clearly the goal for all technical research in this field. The robots act completely au- tonomously, thus processing data from their onboard sensors. Furthermore they communicate with the other cooperating robots and generate own strategies towards their goal. In robot soccer two different organizations exists, which organize competitions. The FIRA 2 is one of them and organizes competitions in the following cate- gories: NaroSOT, MiroSOT, RoboSOT, KheperaSOT and HuroSOT. The category MiroSOT (Micro Robot Soccer Tournament) (Fig. 1) is basically a vision-based one, how- ever typically it is performed as a remote brainless system. In this configuration two teams play soccer against each other on a black playground with an orange golf ball. One or two host computers per team control the robots. The size of the robots is limited to a cube with an edge length of 75mm. Each robot has to be marked on its top with at least one color. The positions of the moving objects on the playground are detected by the aid of their color information.