Virtual Referee: A system to identify off- sides in Football

The off-side rule is the most complicated rule in soccer. Today, off-sides are determined with the help of referees running on the sides of the field or with the help of cameras. However, for lower league games the installation of a camera based system is very expensive. This work proposes a sensor based system that can be worn by players which can automatically detect off-sides. In order to create such a system, two aspects had to be researched (a) localisation and (b) ball detection. This work provides an evaluation of an ultra-wide band system in outdoor conditions to solve the localisation problem and various proximity based sensors to solve the ball detection problem. The primary research objective of this work was to find the pit-falls of the ultra-wide band system with respect to our application. It was found that the tri-lateration algorithm implemented on the devices contributed to a lot of errors in localisation accuracy and the overall system suffered from significant packet loss. A custom tri-lateration algorithm along with hardware improvements are proposed. Our results show that the localisation errors are reduced by 56 % and improved system suffers from nearly no packet loss. As for ball detection, results show that ToF sensors provided the best accuracy in detecting the ball.Electrical Engineering | Embedded System