NAO Humanoid Robot Selected to Replace AIBO for RoboCup!
August 15th, 2007 by SteveAs most of you probably know, Sony’s little dog bots are no longer in production. For quite some time they have been used in the RoboCup Competition’s “Four Legged League.”
That’s up until now….
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They are being replaced by the Aldebaran’s NAO Humanoid Robots for use in the RoboCup Competition. For lack of four legs on the new robots, the “Four Legged League” of the RoboCup competition has also been renamed to the “Standard Platform League”. |
The RoboCup competition features teams that program to these fully autonomous-capable bipedal robots for a game of robot soccer. The standard state-of-the-art platform will allow teams to focus on programming the autonomous control of the robots. The user will have an array of different sensors and servos built into the NAO Humanoid Robot to tinker with, for success in the RoboCup Competition.
via (Robot Dreams)
Currently, there exist a number of different RoboCup soccer leagues that focus on different aspects of this challenge. The Standard Platform League is one of them. In the league all teams use identical robots. Therefore the teams concentrate on software development only, while still using state-of-the-art robots. The robots operate fully autonomously, i.e. there is no external control, neither by humans nor by computers. This year, the league goes through a transition from the four-legged Sony AIBO to the humanoid Aldebaran Nao.
With all the work he’s been doing with the NAO and MSRS, we’re willing to bet that Chris Kilner over at dotnetrobot will be playing a role in getting these little guys running around the field.
August 30th, 2007 at 3:37 am
As far as I know, Nao will be powered by URBI, not MSRS. The work done by Chris Kilner is just to create a video of the robot in the microsoft simulation environment. Currently Nao runs Linux, and MSRS works on Windows only, so I guess there would be still a lot of work to make this work with MSRS.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Thanks for the heads up Fred. I started wondering a bit once I read that the Nao is running Linux. It’s a little hard to believe though that the only reason why Chris did all that work was just to simulate the robot. I’m no expert in MSRS by any means, but if you can’t use the robot in MSRS what’s the point of spending the time on simulation? Can you still use the data coming out of the simulation environment and import it somehow into another system?