GoalROB
A three-person, three-discipline soccer robot built for a Robotics Fundamentals course. Won the competition, won the class. My first taste of computer vision.
The brief
The course closed with a robotics competition. Three-person teams designed and built a small robot to play soccer under a set of specific rules from our professor. Hardware, software, and a working strategy were the full scope.
Three disciplines, one chassis
The work split across electronics, mechanics, and vision. We handled our own electronics on a microcontroller, designed and 3D-printed the mechanical parts, and wrote the perception layer in Python with OpenCV. That last part was where the real challenges were. It was my first time facing computer vision problems, turning a camera into a useful sensor instead of a recording device.
Match day
We made the finals and, not without some problems during the match, won the competition. I also ended the semester with the best overall grade in the class. The real prize was the one I did not see coming: a working mental model of computer vision that I have used in some form on almost every project since. ParkHere ran on the same instinct a year later. So did the BODOQUE field model a decade later.