Open source robots play football

What could be cooler humanoid robot? Hey, of course - a humanoid robot that plays football! And you can buy one for just 25 pieces.
A robot developed by researchers at the University of Bonn is more than just another droid for the highly popular RoboCup competitions . The kid combines serious technical achievements and at the same time simple design and open source software, so that anyone can build their own bot. Software and drawings (.zip) are available on GitHub .

“I had the idea to open the platform to make the lives of other developers easier,” says computer technology expert Dr. Sven Behnke. “Of course, such a robot, in principle, can do many things, but it is unlikely that in the near future it will learn something useful. This is a research project. ”
')
A robot that deserves a more expressive name than NimbRo-OP falls into the “young” (TeenSize) category of soccer players, robots, which corresponds to a height of at least a meter and a weight of about 6.6 kg. Twenty drives translate computer commands into human movements - walking, turning, hitting the ball, he even knows how to get up from a lying position.

“Some of these chips were already seen in smaller robots,” says Behnke, “but the difficulty was in the need to create toy worlds for them, for example, with steps they could climb — as a result, they were impractical.” robots have their own characteristics, including a six-figure price and relative fragility. NimbRo-OP can interact with the real world, its production is much cheaper, easier to transport, and probably more durable. Behnke and company are always waiting for this baby to rise after a fall.

NimbRo-OP uses a dual-core AMD E-450 processor, which is more than most football robots, has 2 gigabytes of memory and 64 gigabyte SSD. The software is based on DARwin-OP. The droid is equipped with a three-axis gyroscope (three-axis gyro) and a wide-angle camera Logitech C905, with which it is much easier for him to see the ball and the target. Power is supplied from 3.6Ah. lithium-polymer battery, and ultra-fast Wi-Fi supports communication during competitions, where it is not so easy to catch the signal because of the large number of people connecting. The robot is very lightweight, and its carbon-plastic arms, legs and feet power 20 Robotis Dynamixel servo drives.

“We wanted to make everything as simple as possible,” says Behnke. “It is enough for people who participate in competitions to know what a screwdriver is in order to replace a broken engine.”

NimbRo-OP is only the first stage of the project, the purpose of which is to accelerate the development of robots by revealing the manufacturing process. The development will be useful both on and off the field, because these robots have the potential to use tools, climb stairs, climb places that are inaccessible to other robots. You can order yourself the same for a starting price of € 20,000, plus taxes and shipping from the University of Bonn.

Meanwhile, the team is preparing to participate in RoboCup in June next year, which will be held in the Netherlands. “What I really hope for is that next year’s competition will be harder thanks to this new robot,” says Behnke. - “When there are no problems with the hardware, other teams involved in software will be involved in the competition.”