Humanoid soccer serves as a benchmark problem for artificial intelligence research and robotics. Every year, more teams are competing, for example, in the RoboCup Humanoid League. As the robots improve in the basic skills of walking, kicking, and getting up, teams can focus on soccer skills and team coordination. The complexity of soccer behaviors and team play calls for structured behavior eng...

This paper describes our stereo vision method which is combining an omnidirectional and a perspective camera. It was developed for our robot soccer team 1. RFC Stuttgart, which attends RoboCup competitions every year. The common approach to stereovision leads to high deviations from the real positions when it is not possible to synchronize the cameras for tracking moving objects and when the or...

The authors have applied reinforcement learning method to a mobile robot with vision system. We selected a task for the robot from skills for playing soccer. In the rst stage, a robot learned to shoot a ball into a goal. In the second stage , we set up an opponent just before the goal, that is, a goal keeper, and make the robot learn to shoot a ball into a goal avoiding the goal keeper. This pa...

The purpose of this research is to develop multi‐ talented humanoid robots, based on technologies featuring high‐computing and control abilities, to perform onstage. It has been a worldwide trend in the last decade to apply robot technologies in theatrical performance. The more robot performers resemble human beings, the easier it becomes for the emotions of audiences ...

Over the past few years, soccer-playing humanoid robots have advanced significantly. Elementary skills, such as bipedal walking, visual perception, and collision avoidance have matured enough to allow for dynamic and exciting games. When two robots are fighting for the ball, they frequently push each other and balance recovery becomes crucial. In this paper, we report on insights we gained from...

We demonstrate a conversational humanoid robot that allows users to follow their own dialogue structures. Our system uses a hierarchy of reinforcement learning dialogue agents, which support transitions across sub-dialogues in order to relax the strictness of hierarchical control and therefore support flexible interactions. We demonstrate our system with the Nao robot playing two versions of a ...

Hiroaki Kitano from the Sony Research Laboratories presents the latest developments in the world robotic soccer competition known as RoboCup. New initiatives for RoboCup include the Sony Dog (Aibo) league, the recent developments in humanoid ro!?otics, and programs such as RoboCup Rescue. RoboCup is a worldwide initiative to foster research into artificial intelligence and cooperative robotics....

This paper investigates users’ preferred interaction modalities when playing an imitation game with KASPAR, a small child-sized humanoid robot. The study involved 16 adult participants teaching the robot to mime a nursery rhyme via one of three interaction modalities in a real-time Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) experiment: voice, guiding touch and visual demonstration. The findings suggest that...

This paper presents a system for marking or covering players on an opposing soccer team so as to best prevent them from scoring. A basis for the marking system is the introduction of prioritized role assignment, an extension to SCRAM dynamic role assignment used by the UT Austin Villa RoboCup 3D simulation team for formational positioning. The marking system is designed to allow for decentraliz...

This paper introduces an open architecture humanoid robotics platform (OpenHRP for short) on which various building blocks of humanoid robotics can be investigated. OpenHRP is a virtual humanoid robot platform with a compatible humanoid robot, and consists of a simulator of humanoid robots and motion control library for them which can also be applied to a compatible humanoid robot as it is. Ope...