Dual-circle self-localization for soccer robots with omnidirectional vision

A self-localization method entitled dual-circle self-localization (DCSL) for mobile robots in a soccer robot game field is proposed in this article. To evaluate the performance of the proposed localization method, an omnidirectional vision device is installed on top of the robot to capture images for recognizing objects in the environment via a hybrid scanning method. Three reliable objects recognized are then chosen as landmarks to calculate the position of the robot in the game field via the proposed DCSL based on relative positions between the robot and landmarks in the omnidirectional images. Since only simple geometric manipulations are required for the DCSL algorithm, localization efficiency can be significantly improved while maintaining a relatively smaller mean error in comparison to Monte Carlo localization techniques as demonstrated in both simulation results and practical experiments in this article.