Development of a High-Performance Humanoid Soccer Robot

Abstract

The RoboCup, which is a worldwide robot soccer competition, has set an ambitious goal for itself: to have a humanoid robot team win against human teams in World Cup Soccer by 2050. In order to achieve this goal, the robots require highly sophisticated sensory-data processing and decision-making functions. The development of robots for the RoboCup Humanoid League also has significant meaning for the development of robotics. However, this development is not easy and there are few papers covering it and its design policy. This paper reports the design policy for humanoids developed by Team Osaka, whose robots have been selected as the best humanoid robots four times in the last four years. In addition to the design policy, this paper also reports on the developmental process and comparisons among humanoid versions developed by Team Osaka. We believe that this paper will offer much information to other researchers who are developing humanoids for the RoboCup.

Humanoid Robots in Soccer: Robots Versus Humans in RoboCup 2050

“…Team Osaka was among the first to be able to move quickly and reliably across the playing field with the VStone robot that featured an omnidirectional vision system in the head. Consequently, they won the soccer competition two times in succession [3].…”

Behaviour coordinations and motion synchronizations for humanoid robot

“…Mostly, the developments are gone through many stages in mechanical structure, hardware designs, electronics control and related software to fulfil the requirements of the robot competitions. [1][2][3] A simple control systems are infeasible for satisfying the requirements of soccer game. The need arises to migrate to a more powerful modular-based control scheme to endow the robot with a high computational capability.…”

“…There are embedded solutions which use popular control schemes such as distributed embedded control architecture and locomotion control scheme. [3][4][5] These schemes support network communications, mapping and localization.…”

RoboCup Humanoid League Rule Developments 2002–2014 and Future Perspectives

“…Furthermore, the robots used an omni-vision system in the head of the robot, which allowed the robots a 360-degree view of the playing field. The VStone robots were extremely successful in the soccer competitions and won them two times in succession ( [2], Fig. 2).…”