Robot soccer as a culminating design project for undergraduates

For the past four years, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at BYU has sponsored a one-on-one robot soccer competition as one of several electives within the senior capstone design project. Teams of four students design and build autonomous robots that must fit within a seven inch cube. The soccer field is roughly the size of a ping-pong table and a golf ball is used as the soccer ball. An overhead camera provides sensory input for the robots. Much of the project involves the creation and debugging of software, ranging from image processing code to multi-level control software to allow precise movement and intelligent play. Using a custom simulator of the game environment, software is developed and tested in parallel with the creation of the robot hardware. This paper describes the complete program and explains how it has been tailored to become an exceptional capstone project for senior electrical and computer engineering students.