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Introduction

This document gives an overview over the current state of the software base developed by the Berlin United - Nao Team Humboldt to control a humanoid robot in the context of the robot soccer competition RoboCup. The release of the code base accompanying this report and the corresponding technical documentation can be found under the following links:

Docu: https://github.com/BerlinUnited/NaoTH/wiki

Code: https://github.com/BerlinUnited/NaoTH

Team

The research group NaoTH is part of the research lab for Adaptive Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin headed by Prof. Verena Hafner. At the current state the core team consists of about 12 students of Bachelor, Master/Diploma, and PhD levels. Besides the direct participation at the RoboCup competitions NaoTH is involved in teaching at the university, public engagement and building of the RoboCup community.

NaoTH was founded at the end of 2007 at the AI research lab headed by Prof. Hans-Dieter Burkhard. As a direct successor of the Aibo Team Humboldt which was active in the Four Legged League of the RoboCup as a part of the GermanTeam until 2008. GermanTeam won the world championship three times during its existence.

NaoTH participated yearly at the RoboCup competitions since the first SPL competition in 2008 in Suzhou. The most recent achievements include 3rd place in the Outdoor Competition at the RoboCup world championship in 2016 and 2nd place in the Mixed Team Competition as part of the team DoBerMan at the RoboCup 2017.

In 2010 and 2011 we also competed in the 3D Simulation league with the same code as used for the SPL. In the 3D Simulation, we won the German Open and the AutCup competitions and achieved the 2nd place at the RoboCup World Championship 2010 in Singapore.

In 2011 we formed a conjoint team Berlin United with the team FUmanoids from Berlin, which participated in the KidSize League. The collaboration included extensive exchange of experience, sharing of code and organization of joint workshops. In 2017 the team FUmanoids ceased to exist. Since then NaoTH remains the only member of Berlin United and continues to compete under this name.

In 2017 and 2018 NaoTH competed together with the team NaoDevils as joint team DoBerMan at the RoboCup SPL Mixed Team Competition and achieved 2nd place in both years. In 2017 NaoTH won the 2nd place in the challenger shield and in 2018 reached the quarterfinals in the champions cup of the main competition.

Summary

Our general research fields include agent-oriented techniques and Machine Learning with applications in Cognitive Robotics. Currently, we mainly focus on the following topics:

  • Software architecture for autonomous agents (section 2{reference-type="ref" reference="s:architecture"})

  • Narrowing the gap between simulated and real robots (section 3.5)

  • Dynamic motion generation (section 6{reference-type="ref" reference="s:dynamic_motions"})

  • World modeling (section 5{reference-type="ref" reference="s:modeling"})