Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Radio Transmitters Follow the Bouncing Ball

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2002 13:10:06 -0500

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/05/technology/circuits/05next.html

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December 5, 2002

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WHAT'S NEXT
Radio Transmitters Follow the Bouncing Ball
By IAN AUSTEN

S with many soccer fans in Germany, it's probably best not to remind Hanno Reinert about the 1966 World Cup. "All Germans recall the Wembley goal,'' he said in a voice tinged with bitterness rather than nostalgia.

England won that year's final 4-2 over West Germany in overtime at Wembley Stadium in London. Even after 36 years, there is still debate about the goal that put England ahead for good. Many in Germany argue that the ball - which hit the crossbar, bounced straight down and then back onto the field - never actually crossed the goal line.

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This year's World Cup in South Korea and Japan set off similar arguments, particularly over calls by referees that sent Italy's team home early. It also finished with a defeat for Germany in the final.

Rather than just complain about the unfairness of it all, Mr. Reinert is proposing to replace human eyes with electronic signals to judge goals and offside plays in soccer. The system, being developed by a German company, Cairos Technologies, should also be able to generate data for analyzing players' performances, filling the dead air during television broadcasts with even more statistics, and to ensure that robot cameras keep their lenses on the ball.

"Soccer, of course, is very conservative," said Mr. Reinert, the company's chief executive. "But there have been too many problems with wrong decisions. So the sport cannot depend on the current system any longer."

Mr. Reinert, a lawyer and economist, found himself in the electronic refereeing business after a legal client that owned a small engineering company was informally asked if it could come up with such a system. It quickly became apparent that developing such a system was beyond that company's skills, so Mr. Reinert was persuaded to organize Cairos and raise money for a more ambitious project.

Scientists and engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, Germany, which was contracted to design the system, immediately ruled out tracking the ball and the players with transponder chips like those used to record the times of marathon runners. Such chips receive a low-power radio signal and transmit an identifying electronic signal in return.

While transponders are suitable for tracking the movements of relatively slow-moving objects such as marathon runners, their return signal rate is too low for keeping tabs on fast-moving, high-flying soccer balls.

Global Positioning System technology, a specialty of the Fraunhofer engineers who are working on the system, was briefly considered. But René Dünkler, an engineer and technical marketing representative at Fraunhofer, said that such a system would fail when most needed.

"If the ball is under the goalkeeper, you cannot use G.P.S. because you do not have a line of sight to the navigation satellites,'' he said.

The system that the institute eventually developed relies on tiny microwave radio transmitters carrying equally small, rechargeable batteries that are built into the players' shin pads and the ball. Up to 10 receiving antennas, some at field level and others atop towers that illuminate the field, create a virtual three-dimensional grid in the stadium.

A computer figures out the location of the ball and the players by analyzing the delays between when the identification signals leave their transmitters - at a rate of up to 2,000 times a second - and when they reach each of the antennas.

When the computer detects a goal or offside play, a separate wireless system can send the news to wristwatch-style receivers worn by the referees on the field.

"The accuracy depends on the application, but it can be within centimeters," Mr. Dünkler said. "You need higher accuracy for some areas like the goal and offside. But for statistics about players, you don't need highly accurate measurements."

The system's ability to record the activity of every player, Mr. Reinert believes, may ultimately be as big an attraction as its ability to referee. Coaches and trainers will be able to review a player's position at every point in a game and to see how far and how quickly balls traveled after they were kicked.

"This will be very, very important to coaches," Mr. Reinert said.

A prototype system was recently installed in Nuremberg's Franconia Stadium. Next year sports researchers from the Technical University of Munich will test the system for reliability and accuracy. Assuming that goes well, Mr. Reinert said, the current plan is to run test games with the system in 2004.

One unresolved issue is where the transmitter will be placed within the soccer ball. The current test system uses a nonregulation foam ball. Mr. Reinert said that Cairos was working with a ball manufacturer to find a way to suspend a transmitter in the center of a conventional inflated ball. The company is also considering embedding two or more transmitters just beneath the ball's outer covering.

Mr. Reinert said that tests indicated that the transmitters could withstand blows greater than 3,000 times the force of gravity, or 3,000 G's, while professional soccer players' kicks inflict only about 700 G's.

As for potential concerns that players would constantly be exposed to radio waves, Mr. Reinert said that the transmitters put out less than 1 percent of the amount of electromagnetic energy of a typical cellphone.

Cairos hopes that the system, which will cost about $250,000 to install in a stadium, will be used for the 2006 World Cup final in Germany. That will depend on soccer's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA. Cairos has made a presentation to the group, but a spokesman for FIFA declined to comment on the system.

American football has obvious potential uses for the system, although Cairos has yet to pitch it to the National Football League. "Tell them to give us a call,'' said Greg Aiello, a spokesman for the N.F.L. "We're always interested in technology, and we have our own controversies over calls."

At World Cup Time, The Web Never Sleeps  (June 6, 2002)
$

International Hangout; From Videos to Playful Votes: Soccer Central  (June 6, 2002)
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Robots Learn Soccer (and the Game of Life)  (November 27, 2001)
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WEB CELEBS; Turning Fame On the Field To Good Use  (October 25, 2000)
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