Design issues for a Robocup goalkeeper

This paper presents Saracinescu, the goalkeeper robot of the Italian team that was used at the Robocup \u201998 Paris championship. The machine features an original omni-directional vision system whose performance, enhanced by a simple but effective movement strategy, proved to be very smart and led to good results during the tournament. The paper describes the vision algorithms in detail, and discusses some issues that are still being developed and/or refined. An overview of the other components of the machine (mechanical structure and ball-kicking mechanism, computing architecture, auxiliary software routines for initial positioning, etc.) is also included