Versatile, high-quality motions and behavior control of humanoid soccer robots

Many different and high-quality humanoid motions have been developed based on a tailored, 55cm tall humanoid robot kinematics and design using 21 servo motors and inertial sensors for stabilization. These include fast forward walking of about 1.5 km/h in permanent operation, multidirectional walking capabilities, a variety of standard and spectacular kicks, standing up motions as well as motions displaying an emotional state of the robot. While all robot motions are executed in real-time on a controller board an adaptive selection of different motions and autonomous robot behavior are controlled by hierarchical state machine executed on an onboard Pocket PC. Information about the current state of the dynamic environment in a soccer game is obtained from two directed cameras with wide and narrow angles. During RoboCup 2006 the robot demonstrated the fastest walking of all kidand teen-size humanoid robots on regular terrain as well as in the rough terrain challenge. Also a large variety of different motions as well as individual and team behaviors during successful autonomous soccer games have been demonstrated including the scoring of a goal with the first autonomously performed backheel kick of a humanoid robot.