Playing Soccer with RoboSapien

Due to limited availability of humanoid robots and the high costs involved, multi-agent experiments with humanoid robots have been at least difficult so far. With the introduction of RoboSapien, a low-cost humanoid robot developed for the toy market, this situation has changed. This paper describes how we augmented multiple RoboSapiens to obtain a team of soccer playing humanoid robots. We added a Pocket PC and a color camera to the robot base to make it autonomous. For a team of these augmented RoboSapiens, we implemented computer vision and self localization. We designed basic soccer skills, such as approaching the ball, dribbling the ball towards the goal, and defending the goal. We set up a soccer field and played test games in our lab to evaluate the system. The paper reports experiences made during these soccer matches as well as results on a scoring task. We also tested this system at RoboCup German Open 2005, where we played soccer matches against the Brainstormers Osnabrück, who also used augmented RoboSapiens.