A ROS-based Software Framework for the NimbRo-OP Humanoid Open Platform
This provides a practical software solution for researchers using the NimbRo-OP platform in robotics, particularly for humanoid soccer tasks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ROS middleware and humanoid platforms.
The paper tackles the development of a software framework for the NimbRo-OP humanoid robot, based on ROS, to enable hardware abstraction, perception, and behavior generation, resulting in its successful use to implement basic soccer skills that contributed to winning the RoboCup 2013 Humanoid League.
Over the past few years, a number of successful humanoid platforms have been developed, including the Nao and the DARwIn-OP, both of which are used by many research groups for the investigation of bipedal walking, full-body motions, and human-robot interaction. The NimbRo-OP is an open humanoid platform under development by team NimbRo of the University of Bonn. Significantly larger than the two aforementioned humanoids, this platform has the potential to interact with a more human-scale environment. This paper describes a software framework for the NimbRo-OP that is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) middleware. The software provides functionality for hardware abstraction, visual perception, and behavior generation, and has been used to implement basic soccer skills. These were demonstrated at RoboCup 2013, as part of the winning team of the Humanoid League competition.