Soccer Ball Sold Out

[Greg McKaskle]

For teams intending to use vision to locate the soccer ball, there are a number of things that may be useful to consider.

1. The soccer ball chosen doesn't have a saturated color that is easy to mask. Robo Cup traditionally uses orange elements to make things easy, but they are starting to move away from that to up the challenge.

2. 3D shapes illuminated with directional lighting produce a huge variation in the shade of the color. Almost half of the ball will be in its own shadow.

3. Bright lights cause specular reflections -- glare. Matte objects have larger blurrier reflections which are a blend of the surface and light color, and shiny objects have smaller, sharper and brighter reflections which tend more towards the light color. In other words, no matter what the color, the field lighting and shop lighting will cause many holes in the image of the ball.

On the positive side, you might consider the background behind the soccer ball. Think of the soccer ball, shadows, etc. punching a hole in the carpet. Especially for autonomous, this seems like it might be a viable approach for locating the ball using the camera.

Greg McKaskle