Playing Soccer with RoboSapien

Abstract

Abstract. Due to limited availability of humanoid robots and the high costs involved, multi-agent experiments with humanoid robots have been at least difficult so far. With the introduction of RoboSapien, a low-cost humanoid robot developed for the toy market, this situation has changed. This paper describes how we augmented multiple RoboSapiens to obtain a team of soccer playing humanoid robots. We added a Pocket PC and a color camera to the robot base to make it autonomous. For a team of these augmented RoboSapiens, we implemented computer vision and self localization. We designed basic soccer skills, such as approaching the ball, dribbling the ball towards the goal, and defending the goal. We set up a soccer field and played test games in our lab to evaluate the system. The paper reports experiences made during these soccer matches as well as results on a scoring task. We also tested this system at RoboCup German Open 2005, where we played soccer matches against the Brainstormers Osnabrück, who also used augmented RoboSapiens.

A Formalization of the Coach Problem

“…The role-based approach to ad hoc teamwork by Genter et al [18] determines role selection on the team's utility. In robot soccer, roles have been based on absolute position in the field [32], position relative to the ball [2,3,31] and robot trajectories, sometimes also considering positions of other players [48].Other work on team coordination through roles and dynamic positioning can be found for example in [28,27,13]. Desheng et al achieve collaboration between simulated agents via roles in situation calculus.…”

Humanoid Soccer Robots (Humanoide Fußballroboter)

“…For example, team NimbRo [5] used an off-the field computer to fuse ball observations of individual robots to a global ball estimate. This was communicated to the robots to be used in case the ball was outside their field of view.…”

A Low-Cost Humanoid Robot with Human Gestures Imitation Capabilities

“…The work of Behnke et al [2] is the only one that has considered the use of Robosapien for research purposes. The authors have developed an augmented version of Robosapien VI.…”

“…The second method is to bypass the remote controller with an infrared transmitter connected to a processing unit. This strategy is less intrusive but it only allows to send motor commands to the robot, therefore it also requires external sensors like a camera, as proposed in [2]. In this work we chose a similar approach.…”