SFBOT

PURPOSE and GOAL

The MIROSOT Project involves researching, designing and packaging a robot soccer team which will meet the requirement of "The MIROSOT Law of the Game" and suitable for the MIROSOT tournament environment.

The hardware system must be portable, reliable, inexpensive, and easy to install and maintain. Research is essential to apply wireless communication technology, sensor packaging, miniature motor driving system, and most of all, a power supply that will meet above described criteria.

The software application must to be fault-tolerant, field-upgrade-able and user-friendly. The system can be relatively easily re-build by using standard GUI based object programming languages such as Java, C++ and OpenGL.

The MIROSOT project involves students participating through team and individual efforts to directly link the project with engineering science courses, projects and theses, specially in the following areas:

Microelectronics - sensors, micro-controllers.

Systems - electrical and mechanical system control.

Communications - RF and IR wireless network.

Software Engineering - object oriented and real time system programming.

Team work - project management, international and inter-personal co-operation, and networking.

Engineering entrepreneurship - fundraising from funding agencies and industry to sponsor the project.

Given the wide areas of applicabilities, the project should prove beneficial to the educational activities of the School. In a word, our mission is to:

Team Membership

All graduate and undergraduate students, faculty and staff interested in participating are welcome.

Chao Cheng, Staff Team Leader

Jagjot Dhaliwal, Student Team Leader

Heidi Lam, Software Engineer - Software designing, testing and implementation

Michael Wong (Hougee), Software Engineer - AI Software designing, testing and implementation

Team Coordinators:

Team E-mail: mirosot-active@sfu.ca

Team Web URL:SFU MIROSOT

Team Fax: +1-604-291-4951

Team Phone: +1-604-291-3820

Team Advisor:

Dr. Shahram Payandeh, Professor (academic and technical)

Dr. Andrew Rawicz, Professor (rawicz@sfu.ca) (academic and technical)

Dr. Glenn Chapman, Professor (glennc@sfu.ca) (academic and technical)

Steve Whitemore (technical documentation)

Team Sponsors and Suppliers

Project Life Cycle and Stages:

Life Cycle:

To build a MIROSOT robot team, there is a spectrum of approaches. A team can be formed with less intelligent robots that are completely controlled by a central computer OR with automatous robots with little central control.

We will build our system starting with basic robots ( a mechanical platform with a metal base, two wheels, two motors, motor control unit and a RF link) and central computer ( a PC with control programs, vision system and RF link).

Based on this foundation, we will experiment with different approaches that eventually upgrade the system to an astomous robot team.

Design Stages:

Strategic Design: Build a simulator using robotic system theory to study and play the strategies of the game.

Design Specifications: Document the functions and specifications based on strategic design as the guide of the design process. Analyse and justify the component cost of the project.

Prototype: Build a system using the simulator to demonstrate the system concept. Then build a prototype model to proof the concept. The prototype can also be used for demos and promotion of the team.

Implementation: Construct the system for official tournaments.

Upgrade: Refine the system and develop future systems.