Neural Network in Computer Vision for RoboCup Middle Size League

Abstract

Robot World Cup Initiative (RoboCup) is a worldwide competition proposed to advance research in robotics and artificial intelligence. It has a league called RoboCup soccer devoted for soccer robots, which is a challenge because robots are mobile, fully autonomous, multi-agents, and they play on a dynamic environment. Moreover, robots must recognize the game entities, which is a crucial task during a game. A camera is usually used as an input system to recognize ball, opponents, soccer field, and so on. These elements may be recognized applying some tools of computational intelligence, for example an artificial neural network. This paper describes the application of an artificial neural network on middle size robotic football league, where a multilayer perceptron neural network is trained with the backpropagation algorithm, to classify elements on the image. Each output neuron represents an entity and its output value depends on the current entity that is present on the image. The results show that an artificial neural network successfully classified the entities. They were recognized even when similar color entities were present on the image.