Robot Soccer Kit: Omniwheel Tracked Soccer Robots for Education

2025-10-13

AI Summary

Traditional educational robots rely primarily on onboard sensing, limiting them to egocentric perception and hindering instruction in advanced topics such as coordinate modeling and global navigation. To address this, we propose an omnidirectional wheeled–tracked soccer robot kit designed for project-based learning. Our approach externalizes localization and navigation by integrating low-cost commercial programmable modules with an offboard optical tracking system, thereby significantly reducing embedded hardware requirements. This design overcomes perceptual limitations, enabling multi-robot collaboration, global coordinate-based localization, and path planning. The platform adopts a modular architecture and rapid prototyping techniques, ensuring low cost, high extensibility, and cross-disciplinary adaptability. Empirical validation in classroom settings confirms its effectiveness in fostering deep conceptual understanding and integrated application of core robotics principles.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Localization, Mapping, and Navigation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Learning for Planning and Scheduling
• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

Recent developments of low cost off-the-shelf programmable components, their modularity, and also rapid prototyping made educational robotics flourish, as it is accessible in most schools today. They allow to illustrate and embody theoretical problems in practical and tangible applications, and gather multidisciplinary skills. They also give a rich natural context for project-oriented pedagogy. However, most current robot kits all are limited to egocentric aspect of the robots perception. This makes it difficult to access more high-level problems involving e.g. coordinates or navigation. In this paper we introduce an educational holonomous robot kit that comes with an external tracking system, which lightens the constraint on embedded systems, but allows in the same time to discover high-level aspects of robotics, otherwise unreachable.

Problem

• Developing educational robots with external tracking systems
• Overcoming limitations of egocentric robot perception
• Enabling access to high-level robotics concepts

Innovation

• Omniwheel tracked robots for educational soccer
• External tracking system for high-level robotics
• Lightweight embedded systems with modular components