Introduction

Currently, the Small Size League is the only RoboCup competition that permits the use of external sensing systems. Most teams use a color camera that is mounted above the field to determine the positions of the robots and the ball. Since this simplified setup is not compatible with the idea of autonomous robots, we decided to build a second F180 team for the World Championships 2001 in Seattle, consisting of (only) three robots using local omnidirectional vision, the ``FU-Fighters Omni".
Despite of the small number of robots the team was quite successful, since we scored several goals playing in the regular SmallSize league (having played together with the ViperRoos team). We even had a tie with a global vision team (4:4). We won the local vision contest, an extra competition between four local vision teams.
This paper describes the overall system and the principles that yielded the success.
The remainder of this paper is organized as the following: Section 2 gives an overview of the system. Section 3 describes how visual perception is performed in our implementation. This covers color segmentation, robot self-localization, ball, goal and obstacle detection and tracking. Finally, Section 4 summarizes the results, and describes our future goals.