NimbRo Robots Winning RoboCup 2018 Humanoid AdultSize Soccer Competitions
This work addresses the problem of improving humanoid robot capabilities for competitive soccer, which is incremental as it builds on existing league advancements.
The paper tackled the challenge of advancing robot soccer performance in the Humanoid League by presenting the software and hardware designs that enabled the NimbRo team to win the AdultSize competitions at RoboCup 2018, resulting in the Best Humanoid Award.
Over the past few years, the Humanoid League rules have changed towards more realistic and challenging game environments, which encourage teams to advance their robot soccer performances. In this paper, we present the software and hardware designs that led our team NimbRo to win the competitions in the AdultSize league -- including the soccer tournament, the drop-in games, and the technical challenges at RoboCup 2018 in Montreal. Altogether, this resulted in NimbRo winning the Best Humanoid Award. In particular, we describe our deep-learning approaches for visual perception and our new fully 3D printed robot NimbRo-OP2X.