Development of an Illumination Identification System for the AIBO Robot

The Four Legged League is a division of the RoboCup initiative that uses Sony AIBO robots to further robotics research. Most participants implement vision systems that use the colour of objects to perform identification. Calibration of the colour classification system must be done manually and any changes to the lighting of the environment after calibration reduces the accuracy of the system, often to a point at which the robot is effectively blind. This study investigates the relationships in the colour data of image pixels between different lighting conditions in an effort to identify trends that can be used as the basis of a rule-based system. The aim of the system is to identify the current lighting level as one of a set of known conditions. The proposed system uses the colour data of image pixels and information about the AIBO's location and orientation to identify lighting levels, allowing a vision system to switch to an appropriate pre-cofigured calibration.