Drone Referee - MSD 2017/18

Introduction

Abstract

Being a billion Euro industry, the game of Football is constantly evolving with the use of advancing technologies that not only improves the game but also the fan experience. Most football stadiums are outfitted with state-of-the-art camera technologies that provide previously unseen vantage points to audiences worldwide. However, football matches are still refereed by humans who take decisions based on their visual information alone. This causes the referee to make incorrect decisions, which might strongly affect the outcome of the games. There is a need for supporting technologies that can improve the accuracy of referee decisions. Through this project, TU Eindhoven hopes develop a system with intelligent technology that can monitor the game in real time and make fair decisions based on observed events. This project is a first step towards that goal.

In this project, a drone is used to evaluate a football match, detect events and provide recommendations to a remote referee. The remote referee is then able to make decisions based on these recommendations from the drone. This football match is played by the university’s RoboCup robots, and as a proof-of-concept, the drone referee is developed for this environment.

This project focuses on the design and development of a high level system architecture and corresponding software modules on an existing quadrotor (drone). This project builds upon data and recommendations by the first two generations of Mechatronics System Design trainees with the purpose of providing a proof-of-concept Drone Referee for a 2x2 robot-soccer match.

Problem Description

As mentioned above, the drone referee project was also performed by previous two generations of the PDEng MSD. The ideas the previous generation implemented were:

• To detect ball out of pitch
• To detect collision

However these were not in a live game and more of a proof of concept, where they performed them in a controlled simulation environment. This year the expectations of the stakeholders are to be able to monitor a 5 minute 2-against- 2 robot soccer match with a drone. The next part is a human referee who is at remote location having the drone view of the game and has a user interface which receives a set of recommendation for rule enforcement. The referee then look at the recommendation and replays to decide his final decision via user interface. This decision is then displayed on the audience screen who are near the robot soccer field; also the LEDs on the drone change color to notify whether there is a rule enforcement or not, if so then which rule is to be enforced . Finally the game restarts from the center after the rule is enforced. The rules that were to be detected and enforced were:

• Rule A: Free throw, when the ball is out of pitch, i.e. crossing the 4 lines delimiting the field a free throw is awarded to the team that last did not last touch the ball.
• Rule B: Collision detection, when two robots in pitch touch each other it is considered a foul.