Football Table Table

How it works

The semi-automated foosball table has two DOF per rod.

Starting it up

Homing

Things to watch

Common causes of error

Here we describe some common causes of error

Diagnostics

There is a log file available in the main folder, called MOTION.mat. Here the measured position and the sent control signal are beeing logged, but also the ball position estimated by the IMM/KM.

Poor overal performance

Symptoms: often loosing sight of the ball, missing the ball completely with attempting to shoot.

Bad performance, table soccer-wise is often too to bad detection/calibration. Take into account that changing lighting conditions have a significant impact on the overal performance of the localization. It is not uncommon that lighting conditions change significantly during a day, espicially in a room with direct sunlight.

A quick fix can often be achieved by adjusting the fluorescent lights over the table using the dimmer, to cope with the changed conditions. Similarly adjusting the exposure time (ET) can help. If changing the lighting conditions does not help, then it is advisable to fine-tune the color-calibration itself. When using the white ball, checking and fixing the mask positioning is also advisable.

Sometimes the position of the overhead camera changes during transport, which in turn messes up the camera calibration e.g. the distorion, the mask placement and espicially the rod positions. Symptons of this are e.g. a static offset when trying to hit the ball (whilst detection is good).To fix this one needs to quickly re-run the camera-calibration (not the color-calibration).

Failure in homing

Symptoms: one or more rods fail to reach a central/homed position on the table. However motion during homing is stable and controlled.

Homing is two stage process, first rotational homing takes place after which the lateral direction is homed. Typically failure involves on of the following two cases.

The rod keeps on rotating

The rod finishes homing, but does not reach a central position

Loose sensor cable

Symptoms: puppet slams into the wall or spins out of control during run-time or homing, motion.mat shows encoder output to be zero.

A loose sensor cable will cause a dramatic failure,