Designing a dummy goalie for testing
One of the important features of testing offence programs in the RoboCup Soccer Simulation Demonstration Competition is having an opposing team that can defend. This makes it essential to have a goalie or defender for offensive players to test against. The TFA Junior Robotics team created a dummy player that could simply head towards a ball, and then turn back when the ball was out of range. This goalie can be improved in the future, however, it currently serves an important purpose of testing offensive programs against it.
As seen in the video, the robot heads back to an “origin” point before chasing the ball. The goalie makes a sort of semi-circle area that it can defend in. This ensures that the robot never leaves the goal, yet is also able to defend against balls coming near. This will also be improved on with the ball prediction algorithm that the team is working on right now. With both the ball prediction and the goalie added, the TFA Junior Robotics Team can start practicing their attacking robots. The TFA Junior Robotics Team believes that the attacking portion will be one of the more important and time consuming aspects, and thus, will be focusing lots of attention there as the competition nears.