An overview of RoboCup-2002 Fukuoka/Busan

© 2003, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article reports on the Sixth Robot World Cup Competition and Conference (RoboCup-2002) Fukuoka/Busan, which took place from 19 to 25 June in Fukuoka, Japan. It was the largest RoboCup since 1997 and held the first humanoid league competition in the world. Further, the first ROBOTREX (robot trade and exhibitions) was held with about 50 companies, universities, and institutes represented. A total of 117,000 spectators witnessed this marvelous event, To the best of our knowledge, this was the largest robotic event in history.Peer reviewe

RoboCup: the evolution of a robotic scientific challenge

The RoboCup is a scientific challenge used to foster research in the robotics areas, which main objective consists in developing a robotic football team able to play against a human team in the year 2050. This paper describes the rules of such a competition, the actual state of the art of robotic football players in the middle size league, and describes the main characteristics to take into account in order to build such type of robots. These aspects are described and analysed in terms of further developments.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - projecto “Development of Robotic Football Team for participation in the RoboCup (Middle Size League)”, POSI/ROBO/43892/2002

Mobile robot competitions: fostering advances in research, development and education in robotics

Mobile robot competitions are events well suited to experimentation, research and development in many areas concerned with science and technology, ranging from material science to artificial intelligence. Aware of this fact, and for several years now, some Portuguese Universities have been involving some of their Engineering and Computer Science students in such contests, namely those of international level. The performance has been improving both in terms of the results and prizes obtained and the increasingly elaborate technical solutions developed by the teams. The importance recognised in these events has led the authors to submit to the Portuguese Government a proposal for an annual Festival of this kind in Portugal. This paper points out the advances in research, technology and education, which result from this type of events

Multi-Objective Optimization for Speed and Stability of a Sony Aibo Gait

Locomotion is a fundamental facet of mobile robotics that many higher level aspects rely on. However, this is not a simple problem for legged robots with many degrees of freedom. For this reason, machine learning techniques have been applied to the domain. Although impressive results have been achieved, there remains a fundamental problem with using most machine learning methods. The learning algorithms usually require a large dataset which is prohibitively hard to collect on an actual robot. Further, learning in simulation has had limited success transitioning to the real world. Also, many learning algorithms optimize for a single fitness function, neglecting many of the effects on other parts of the system. As part of the RoboCup 4-legged league, many researchers have worked on increasing the walking/gait speed of Sony AIBO robots. Recently, the effort shifted from developing a quick gait, to developing a gait that also provides a stable sensing platform. However, to date, optimization of both velocity and camera stability has only occurred using a single fitness function that incorporates the two objectives with a weighting that defines the desired tradeoff between them. However, the true nature of this tradeoff is not understood because the pareto front has never been charted, so this a priori decision is uninformed. This project applies the Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) to find a pareto set of fast, stable gait parameters. This allows a user to select the best tradeoff between balance and speed for a given application. Three fitness functions are defined: one speed measure and two stability measures. A plot of evolved gaits shows a pareto front that indicates speed and stability are indeed conflicting goals. Interestingly, the results also show that tradeoffs also exist between different measures of stability

Applying reinforcement learning in playing Robosoccer using the AIBO

"Robosoccer is a popular test bed for AI programs around the world in which AIBO entertainments robots take part in the middle sized soccer event. These robots need a variety of skills to perform in a semi-real environment like this. The three key challenges are manoeuvrability, image recognition and decision making skills. This research is focussed on the decision making skills ... The work focuses on whether reinforcement learning as a form of semi supervised learning can effectively contribute to the goal keeper's decision making when a shot is taken." -Master of Computing (by research

Artificial Vision in the Nao Humanoid Robot

Projecte Final de Màster UPC realitzat en col.laboració amb l'Universitat Rovira i Virgili. Departament d'Enginyeria Informàtica i MatemàtiquesRobocup is an international robotic soccer competition held yearly to promote innovative research and application in robotic intelligence. Nao humanoid robot is the new RoboCup Standard Platform robot. This platform is the new Nao robot designed and manufactured by the french company Aldebaran Robotics. The new robot is an advanced platform for developing new computer vision and robotics methods. This Master Thesis is oriented to the study of some fundamental issues for the artificial vision in the Nao humanoid robots. In particular, color representation models, real-time segmentation techniques, object detection and visual sonar approaches are the computer vision techniques applied to Nao robot in this Master Thesis. Also, Nao’s camera model, mathematical robot kinematic and stereo-vision techniques are studied and developed. This thesis also studies the integration between kinematic model and robot perception model to perform RoboCup soccer games and RoboCup technical challenges. This work is focused in the RoboCup environment but all computer vision and robotics algorithms can be easily extended to another robotics fields

ToBI-Team of Bielefeld The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2016

Meyer zu Borgsen S, Korthals T, Wachsmuth S. ToBI-Team of Bielefeld The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2016. Presented at the RoboCup, Leipzig, Germany

Multi-robot coordination using flexible setplays : applications in RoboCup's simulation and middle-size leagues

Tese de Doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201