JDERobot

Some days ago Dr. Humberto Martínez, from Universidad de Murcia, gave us a talk about his experience in the TeamChaos team. TeamChaos team has competed at the RoboCup in the last years, first in the Sony Legged League with Aibos and now in the Standard Platform League, with the Nao humanoid. RoboCup is a very demanding environment for robotics, as long as it is very dynamic, competitive and the onboard computers have limited computing power.

He described the architecture of the software controlling the robot, named ThinkingCap, some locomotion issues and perception algorithms. Locomotion has increased its complexity from the four legged Aibos to current biped humanoids. Speed and stability are now to key topics. Perception is mainly based in vision and must be very efficient in order to allow responsive behaviors.

You can download the slides used in this talk. And you can see or download full recorded speech on .mpg video here

About two weeks ago, we recorded Pioneer robot wandering over this department hall. The goal is quite simple: the robot must go from one side to another one. It uses a scanning laser in order to avoid dynamic (e.g. people) and static obstacles (e.g. doors, walls).

Experiments show that algorithm is extremely efficient. We tested the system on a real environment, and it was able to wander around obstacles and people who are walking over there.