Introduction and motivation drafts

.gitignore

@@ -23,4 +23,5 @@ exp_*
 *.gz
 *.synctex
 documentation/robotum_report.pdf
-
+documentation/build/
+*.latexmain

documentation/introduction.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+\chapter{Introduction}
+
+RoboCup is an international competition in the field of robotics, the
+ultimate goal of which is to win a game of soccer against a human team by the
+middle of the 21st century. The motivation behind this objective is the
+following: it is impossible to achieve such an ambitious goal with the current
+state of technology, which means that the RoboCup competitions will drive
+scientific and technological advancement in such areas as computer vision,
+mechatronics and multi-agent cooperation in complex dynamic environments. The
+RoboCup teams compete in five different leagues: Humanoid, Standard Platform,
+Medium Size, Small Size and Simulation. Our work in this semester was based on
+the rules of the Standard Platform league. In this league all teams use the
+same robot \textit{Nao}, which is being produced by the SoftBank Robotics. We
+will describe the capabilities of this robot in more detail in the next
+chapter.
+
+One of the most notable teams in the Standard Platform League is
+\textit{B-Human}. This team represents TU Bremen, and in the last nine years
+they won the international RoboCup competition six times and twice were the
+runner-up. The source code of the framework that B-Human use for programming
+their robots is available on GitHub, together with an extensive documentation,
+which makes the B-Human framework an attractive starting point for RoboCup
+beginners.
+
+\section{Out objective and motivation}
+
+In this report we are going to introduce the robotics project, which our team
+worked on during the Summer Semester 2018. The main objective of our work was
+to explore a possible strategy for fast goal scoring. There are three main
+aspects of our motivation behind this objective. The first one is the fact,
+that goal scoring is crucial for winning soccer games, therefore fast and
+effective goal scoring will bring the team closer to victory. Secondly, in
+order to score a goal, many problems and tasks need to be solved, which we will
+describe in close detail in the next chapter. The work on these tasks would
+allow us to acquire new competences, which we could then use to complement the
+RoboCup team of TUM. Finally, this objective encompasses many disciplines, such
+as object detection, mechatronics or path planning, which means that working on
+it might give us a chance to improve over the existing work in these areas.
+
+Having said that, we hope that our project \todo{will be good}, and this report
+will help future students to get familiar with our results and continue our
+work.

documentation/robotum_report.tex

@@ -16,13 +16,15 @@
 
 
 
-% lots of packages are included in the preamble, look there for more information about how this.
+% lots of packages are included in the preamble, look there for more
+% information about how this.
 
-\include{robotum_report.preamble}  %this adds some options, parameters and also shortcuts
+\include{robotum_report.preamble}
 
 
 
-% if you don't know where something can be found, click on the pdf, and Overleaf will open the file where it is described
+% if you don't know where something can be found, click on the pdf, and
+% Overleaf will open the file where it is described
 
 \begin{document}
 \title{\LARGE {\bf Report Project Striker 2018}\\
@@ -46,7 +48,9 @@
 
 
 \setstretch{1.2} % set line spacing
-\include{jonas}
+\input{introduction}
+\input{tools}
+\input{jonas}
 % body of thesis comes here
 %\input{Body/SoftwareTools} %this loads the content of file SoftwareTools.tex in the folder Body.
 %\todo{SoftwareTools} %this is how you add a todo, it will appear in the list on page 2, and in orange in the margin where you add it.
@@ -72,4 +76,4 @@
 \bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
 \bibliography{Bibliography/Bibliography}
 
-\end{document}
+\end{document}

documentation/tools.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,83 @@
+\chapter{Hardware and Software}
+
+\section{Robot}
+
+The aforementioned \textit{Nao} is a small humanoid robot, around 60 cm tall.
+Some of its characteristics are:
+
+\begin{itemize}
+
+\item Two HD-cameras on the head;
+
+\item An ultrasonic rangefinder on the body;
+
+\item An inertial navigation unit (accelerometer and gyroscope);
+
+\item Internet connectivity over Ethernet cable or 802.11g WLAN;
+
+\item Single-Core Intel Atom CPU and 1 GB of RAM;
+
+\item Programmable Joints with overall 25 Degrees of Freedom;
+
+\item Speakers;
+
+\item 60 to 90 minutes battery life.
+
+\end{itemize}
+
+It can be seen from the specifications list, that the multitude of sensors and
+interfaces makes Nao an attractive development platform, suitable for the task
+of \todo{Robocup}. However, relatively weak CPU and a low amount of RAM require
+the programs running on the robot to be resource-efficient, which had to be
+taken into into account during our work on the project.
+
+\section{Software}
+
+In our project we used \textit{NAOqi OS} as an operating system for the robot.
+This is a standard operating system for Nao robots based on Gentoo Linux, and
+it can handle all aspects of robot control, such as reading the sensors, moving
+the robot and establishing the network connection.
+
+As a framework for the implementation of the desired behavior we chose the
+official NAOqi Python SDK. Our experience with this framework is that it is
+easy to use, well documented and also covers most basic functionality that was
+necessary for us to start working on the project. A further advantage of this
+SDK is that it uses Python as the programming language, which allows for quick
+prototyping, but also makes maintaining a large codebase fairly easy.
+
+Finally, the third-party libraries that were used in the project are OpenCV and
+NumPy. OpenCV is a powerful and one of the most widely used open-source
+libraries for computer vision tasks, and NumPy is a popular Python library for
+fast numerical computations. Both of these libraries, as well as the NAOqi
+Python SDK are included in the NAOqi OS distribution by default, which means
+that no extra work was necessary to ensure their proper functioning on the
+robot.
+
+\section{Rejected Software Alternatives}
+
+Here we will briefly discuss what alternative options were available for the
+choice of the base framework, and why we decided not to use those. One
+available option was the official NAOqi C++ SDK. Being based on the C++
+language, this SDK can naturally be expected to have better performance and be
+more resource-efficient, than the Python-based version. We still chose the
+Python SDK, because C++ is not particularly suitable for fast prototyping,
+because of the complexity of the language. It is also worth noting, that we
+never really hit the performance constraints, that couldn't have been overcome
+by refactoring our code, but in the future it might be reasonable to migrate
+some of the portions of it to C++.
+
+Another big alternative is ROS (Robotic Operating System). ROS is a collection
+of software targeted at robot development, and there exists a large ecosystem
+of third-party extensions for ROS, which could assist in performing common
+tasks such as camera and joint calibration. ROS was an attractive option, but
+there was a major downside, that there was no straightforward way to run ROS
+locally on the robot, so the decision was made not to spend time trying to
+figure out how to do that. However, since Python is one of the main languages
+in ROS, it should be possible to incorporate our work into ROS.
+
+Finally, as was already mentioned in the introduction, B-Human Framework is a
+popular choice for beginners, thanks to the quality of the algorithms and good
+documentation. However, B-Human has been in development over many years and is
+therefore a very complex system. The amount time needed to get familiar with
+the code, and then to incorporate our changes would have been too big, for this
+reason we decided to use the simpler option as a starting point.