NimbRo RS: A Low-Cost Autonomous Humanoid Robot for Multi-Agent Research

Due to the lack of commercially available humanoid robots, multi-agent research with real humanoid robots was not feasible so far. While quite a number of research labs construct their own humanoids and it is likely that some advanced humanoid robots will be commercially available in the near future, the high costs involved will make multi-robot experiments at least difficult. For these reasons we started with a low-cost commercial off-the-shelf humanoid robot, RoboSapien (developed for the toy market), and modified it for the purposes of robotics research. We added programmable computing power and a vision sensor in the form of a Pocket PC and a CMOS camera attached to it. Image processing and behavior control are implemented onboard the robot. The Pocket PC communicates with the robot base via infrared and can talk to other robots via wireless LAN. The readily available low-cost hardware makes it possible to carry out multi-robot experiments. We report first results obtained with this humanoid platform at the 8th International RoboCup in Lisbon.