Designing an omnidirectional vision system for a goal keeper robot Robot Soccer

The aim of this paper is to provide a guideline for the design of an omnidirectional vision system for the Robocup domain. We report the design steps undertaken, with a detailed description of the design of an omnidirectional mirror with a custom profile. In the second part, we present the software written to exploit the properties of the designed mirror. The application for which the vision system is designed is the Middle-Size Robocup Championship. The task performed by the vision system is to localise the robot and to locate the ball and other robots in the field of play. Several practical tricks and suggestions are provided.