The challenge of motion planning for humanoid robots playing soccer

Motion planning for humanoids suffers from the high dimensionality of the configuration space. Moreover, the need to satisfy dynamic and static constraints increases the overall difficulty. While the above challenges hold for any humanoid robot, the soccer scenario adds difficulties narrowly addressed in humanoids motion planning research. Dynamic environments with active opponents, the requirement to perform short and long term plans to perform soccer relevant actions, and the necessity to plan also movements purposely terminating with a collision with the ball open a completely new scene for researchers. This paper surveys state of the art research in motion planning for humanoids robots playing soccer, outlining connections, differences, and identifying the key aspects that ought to be addressed in order to develop effective soccer players.