Grown-up NimbRo Robots Winning RoboCup 2017 Humanoid AdultSize Soccer Competitions
This work addresses the problem of advancing humanoid robot soccer capabilities for the RoboCup community, representing incremental progress in a specific competition domain.
The paper tackled the challenge of competing in the 2017 RoboCup Humanoid AdultSize soccer one-on-one games by upgrading the Copedo robot and developing the NimbRo-OP2, along with improved visual perception and behavior generation, resulting in winning the tournament with high scores and technical challenges.
The ongoing evolution of the RoboCup Humanoid League led in 2017 to the introduction of one vs. one soccer games for the AdultSize robots, which motived our team NimbRo to enter this category. In this paper, we present the mechatronic design of our upgraded robot Copedo and the newly developed NimbRo-OP2, which received the RoboCup Design Award. We also describe improved approaches to visual perception of the game situation, including compassless localization on a soccer field with symmetric appearance, and the generation of soccer behaviors. At RoboCup 2017 in Nagoya, our robots played very well, winning the AdultSize soccer tournament with high scores. Our robots also won the technical challenges and we present the developed solutions.