RoboFEI Small Size Soccer League

We are a university research project about robotics. This project specifically if focused on participating on the Small Size League (SSL) competition in the RoboCup. The SSL is a robot soccer league which aims to improve multi robot coordination through a soccer match. During a match, teams of 6, up to 11, robots compete using mostly standard soccer rules. During the game, the robots must act completely autonomous, there can be no human interference, except, only in a few cases, for the referee.

In order to play a match the robot must be able to control five brushless DC motors (BLDC) and a high voltage board that is responsible for

kicking the ball. All the needed electronics are built by the students that participate in the team.

Each year, every team that wants to participate in the RoboCup must submit a video demonstrating the capabilities of their robot's and strategy software. The 2022 video can be seen below. More content can be seen in our youtube channel.

In our electronic design we basically have two boards: main and kick. The main board is responsible for controlling the BLDC motors, processing the radio commands that come trough a nRF24L01 transceiver, activating the kick board, reading the ball sensor and regulating

the voltages needed by the board components. The kick board is responsible for charging a high voltage capacitor up to 160V, and activating a solenoid coil, which is how the robots kick the ball.

The new main board design is mostly focused on modularity and ease of development, therefore, the BLDC control is handled by a comercial electronic speed controller (ESC - https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/b-g431b-esc1.html) and the main processing unit is a STM32 Discovery board (https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/32f411ediscovery.html)