ZJUDancer Team Description Paper Humanoid Kid-Size League of Robocup 2015
Yu DongDong, Liu Yun, Zhou Chunlin, Xiong Rong
State Key Lab. of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
Abstract This document describes the RoboCup Humanoid League team ZJUDancer from Zhejiang University, China, as required by the qualification procedure for the competition to be held in Hefei China,from 17th through 23th July 2015. Full details of our robots including mechanical design, electrical design, sensors and software design are described. With the improved robots, we hope we could get a much better result in 2015.
Statement of Commitment
The ZJUDancer commits to participate in RoboCup 2015 in China and to provide a referee knowledgable of the rules of the Humanoid League.
1 Introduction
The robots developed by ZJUDancer for RoboCup 2015 are fully autonomous humanoid robots which play different parts as a team in the football game. During the past few years, we won the champions of RoboCup China Open 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011,2012 and2013, and advanced to quarter-finals in Robocup 2012 Mexico and Robocup 2013 Netherlands.
Table 1. General Specifications of the robot
| Team Name | ZJUDancer |
|---|---|
| Number of DOF | 20 |
| Height | 80cm |
| Width | 34cm |
| Weight | 7kg |
In Robocup 2014 , ZJUDancer reached the final eight in Humanoid League Kid-Size(4 vs. 4 games). This year, lots of efforts has been made to improve the hardware and the software of our robot system. And we also build the bigger robot to adjust to the big field .The photograph of our robot is shown in Fig.1(b).
Table. 1 shows the general specifications of our robots. Four brand new players from ZJUDancer named Striker, Freedom,Justice and Bearson are fully autonomous humanoid soccer robots. Each robot is fixed to the size and weight limitations of the competition and connected by wireless networks.Fig,1(a) shows our old version of the robot and (b) is the newet one .it is bigger and stronger. Referees directions could be sent to the robot through the network. More details will be introduced in the following sections.
2 Mechanical Specifications
The robot from ZJUDancer has 2 legs, 2 arms, 1 trunk and 1 head. The actuators we selected are Dynamixel MX-106 and MX-64 the new generation. Each robot is driven by 20 servo motors: 6 per leg, 3 in each arm and 2 in the head. The six leg-servos allow for flexible leg movements. Three orthogonal servos constitute the 3-DOF hip joint. Two orthogonal servos form the 2-DOF ankle joint. One servo drives the knee joint. The motor distribution is different but the DOF is the same. Table. 2 shows the details.
For using the new main controller and making the robot thinner, the robot's torso is re-designed. The PCB board and the main controller are placed horizontally. And the battery is placed on the bottom. In addition, in order to protect the motors of the shoulder joints, new mechanical components are designed. In accordance with the rules, the handle is designed at the shoulder of the robot. That make it more convenient while handler picks up the robot during the game.
Table 2. Motor types and Distributions of DOF
| Part | Rotation Axis | Actuator |
|---|---|---|
| Neck | Yaw, Pitch | MX-28, MX-28 |
| Shoulder | Roll, Pitch | MX-64, MX-64 |
| Arm | Pitch | MX-64 |
| Hip | Roll, Yaw | MX-106, MX-106 |
| Knee | Pitch, Pitch | MX-106, MX-106 |
| Ankle | Pitch, Roll | MX-106, MX-106 |
| Total DOF | 20 |
3 Electrical Specifications
Our electrical controllers are the motor controller and the camera controller, specifications of which could be seen in Table.3. The camera controller works as the main controller processing image identification, location, strategies selection and communications. The movement and balance maintaining are implemented by the motor controller which executes the movement direction from the main controller. The total electrical architecture could be seen in Figure.2.
Table 3. Electrical Architecture of our robot
| Camera Controller | Motor Controller | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Atom Z530 | STM32F407Z |
| FLASH | 4GB | 1MB |
| RAM | 1GB | 196Kb |
| OS | Linux | None |
4 Sensor Specifications
There are 4 types of sensors equipped on our robot, which are image sensors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and potentiometers.
- Image sensor. We upgraded robot's camera from Philips SPC900NC to Philips SPC1000NC last year. This kind of camera has a more wide view and it helps improve the efficiency of perception.
- Gyroscopes. Gyroscopes are equipped in the chest of our humanoid robot. It returns the angular velocity for the trunk of humanoid robot and helps to keep the balance of humanoid robot. After the re-design, the gyroscope remained at the center of the chest, but upside down for easy installation.
- Accelerometers. This sensor detects the gravity vector when the robot is static. The main applications of this sensor is that it could be used to recognize whether humanoid robot is standing or lying down. The autonomously getting up from tipping over is depend on this sensor. On the other hand, the dynamic attitude estimate from the fusion of gyros and accelerometers is under research.
- Potentiometer. This sensor detects the rotation angle of the actuator. With this sensor, the robot recognizes the current angular position of the joint. This sensor is controlled by actuator controller.
- Compass. This sensor detects the Earth's magnetic field,which plays an important part in our robots' location
5 Software Architecture
The vision module is mostly based on color segmentation and the central circle is recognized by regression of white points after line-scanning for the white pixels.
After processing the image, particle filter with sensor resetting [3] [4] is used to do the self-localization for robots. Besides, EKF is used to estimate the objects position. Hierarchical finite state machine is designed to manage the robots states. The whole software architecture can be seen in Figure.3.
6 Conclusion
In this paper, we present the specifications of our robot that has two controllers and 20 DOFs. ZJUDancer has made a great progress in both hardware and software during the last year and looks forward to making a new breakthrough in RoboCup 2014. We'd like to share our experience and have a good match with all the teams.
References
- Yu DongDong: ZJUDancer Team Description Paper (2014)
- Du Xinfeng: Fast recognition and precise localization of humanoid soccer robot vision system. Journal of Zhejiang University (Engineering Science). Vol. 43 No. 11, 1975–1981 (2009)
- S. Lenser and M. Veloso: Sensor resetting localization for poorly modeled mobile robots. In Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). (2000)
- J. S. Gutmann and D. Fox: An experimental comparison of localization methods continued. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System. vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 454459.
- User's Manual for Dynamixel MX-28
- User's Manual for Dynamixel MX-64
- User's Manual for Dynamixel MX-106
- W.Richard Stevens, Stephen A. Rago: Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. 2nd Edition. (2005)