Scientific and Technological Challenges in RoboCup

Abstract

Since its inception in 1997, RoboCup has developed into a truly unique and long-standing research community advancing robotics and artificial intelligence through various challenges, benchmarks, and test fields. The main purposes of this article are to evaluate the research and development achievements so far and to identify new challenges and related new research issues. Unlike other robot competitions and research conferences, RoboCup eliminates the boundaries between pure research activities and the development of full system designs with hardware and software implementations at a site open to the public. It also creates specific scientific and technological research and development challenges to be addressed. In this article, we provide an overview of RoboCup, including its league structure and related research issues. We also review recent studies across several research categories to show how participants (called RoboCuppers) address the research and development challenges before, during, and after the annual competitions. Among the diversity of research issues, we highlight two unique aspects of the challenges: the platform design of the robots and the game evaluations. Both of these aspects contribute to solving the research and development challenges of RoboCup and verifying the results from a common perspective (i.e., a more objective view). Finally, we provide concluding remarks and discuss future research directions.

Educational Robotics: Platforms, Competitions and Expected Learning Outcomes

“…Teams are not allowed to modify NAO's hardware; thus, they focus on designing software solutions and improving robot movements. Robots must play completely autonomously, while they can communicate with their team players [166].…”

“…In the RoboCup Rescue Robot League, participants must develop and demonstrate advanced robotic capabilities for emergency responders in a hostile environment [167]. The League uses realistic scenarios such as an earthquake, a flood, or a fire [166]. In the rescue missions, robots face various challenges, including mobility, mapping, sensing, manipulation, communications, and confined space operations.…”

“…The League also created the Open Academic Robot Kit, a set of open-source licensed resources online, where teams can find instructions of robot designs created by 3D printable mechanical parts and source code [167]. Teams are allowed to use teleoperated robots with some autonomous capabilities as assistance functions for the operator [166], [43]. Rescue Simulation League's objective is to develop simulators to realistically represent natural disaster scenarios and develop virtual emergency response robots or agents.…”

“…This League is separated into two sub-leagues, the Virtual Robot Simulation competition, and the Agent Simulation competition [167]. RoboCup@Home intends to develop service and assistive robots that can perform everyday tasks in dynamic home environments [160], [166]. This category's domestic service robot has to cope with challenging tasks such as localization, speech recognition, or grabbing and manipulating objects.…”

“…RoboCup@Home is separated into three categories based on the allowed platforms. The open Platform category use custom platforms and two standard platforms the Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR) and Pepper from SoftBank Robotics are used for the Domestic Standard Platform League and the Social Standard Platform League, respectively [166].…”