This document describes the RoboCup Humanoid League team NimbRo TeenSize of Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany, which is qualified for the competition to be held in Atlanta in July 2007. Our team uses self-constructed robots for playing soccer. The paper describes the mechanical and electrical design of our TeenSize robot Robotinho. It also covers the software used for perception, beha...

An essential capability of a soccer playing robot is to robustly and accurately estimate its pose on the field. Tracking the pose of a humanoid robot is, however, a complex problem. The main difficulties are that the robot has only a constrained field of view, which is additionally often affected by occlusions, that the roll angle of the camera changes continously and can only be roughly estima...

This paper presents an overview of a humanoid soccer robot, build out of readily available hardware. The system architecture is covered in detail thereby enabling the reader to build a starter system for entering bipedal, humanoid soccer competitions. The structure of motion-pages of a Bioloid robot is presented. A vision algorithm to detect goal posts, used for SelfLocalisation of the robot, i...

This paper describes our experience in the simulation of humanoid soccer robots using two general purposes 3D simulators, namely USARSim and Microsoft Robotics Studio. We address the problem of the simulation of a soccer match among two teams of small humanoid robots in the RoboCup Soccer Kid-Size Humanoid competitions. The paper reports the implementation of the virtual models of the Robovie-M...

Competitive bipedal soccer playing robots need to move fast and react quickly to changes in direction while staying upright. This paper describes the application of reinforcement learning to stabilise a flat-footed humanoid robot. An optimal control policy is learned using a physics simulator. The learned policy is supported theoretically and interpreted on a real robot as a linearised continuo...

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 require...

In the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), one of the most popular inspection-based methods for evaluating usability is the Heuristic Evaluation (HE) in gauging and improving the interaction design. With mobile robots exhibiting a stronger presence in commercial markets in the last few years, very little work has been done with heuristic evaluation in human-robot interaction discipline. ...

Robotic soccer teams are multi-robot systems that react autonomously and flexibly to dynamic game environment. They can follow many strategies, some of which are imitation of human soccer teams and require multiple robots to perform collectively. The development of such systems exceeds the concept of conventional mechatronic products. During the early development phase, fundamental design probl...

The humanoid soccer robot league is a new international initiative to foster robotics and AI technologies using soccer games [1]. This paper provides a brief description of a low-cost autonomous humanoid soccer robot called Robo-Erectus (RE), which has been developed in the Center for Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Control (ARICC) at Singapore Polytechnic since 2001. To develop a low-cost hu...

Humanoid soccer robots perceive their environment exclusively through cameras. This paper presents a monocular vision system that was originally developed for use in the RoboCup Humanoid League, but is expected to be transferable to other soccer leagues. Recent changes in the Humanoid League rules resulted in a soccer environment with less color coding than in previous years, which makes percep...