RoboCupSoccer Review: The Goalkeeper, a Distinctive Player

This article offers a literature review of goalkeeper robots in the context of the RoboCupSoccer competition. The latter is one of the various league categories hosted by the RoboCup Federation, which fosters AI and Robotics with their landmark challenges. Despite the number of articles on the subject of the goalkeeper, there is a lack of studies offering a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis. We propose to provide a review of research related to goalkeepers within the RoboCupSoccer leagues in order to extract possible improvements and scientific issues. The goalkeeper, although being a specific player, has many skills in common with other players. Therefore, this review is divided into three parts: perception, cognition and action, where the perception and action parts are common to all players and the cognition part focuses on goalkeepers. The discussion will open up on the possible improvements of the developments made for these goalkeepers.

RoboCup@Home Education 2020 Best Performance: RoboBreizh, a modular approach

Every year, the Robocup@Home competition challenges teams and robots' abilities. In 2020, the RoboCup@Home Education challenge was organized online, altering the usual competition rules. In this paper, we present the latest developments that lead the RoboBreizh team to win the contest. These developments include several modules linked to each other allowing the Pepper robot to understand, act and adapt itself to a local environment. Up-to-date available technologies have been used for navigation and dialogue. First contribution includes combining object detection and pose estimation techniques to detect user's intention. Second contribution involves using Learning by Demonstrations to easily learn new movements that improve the Pepper robot's skills. This proposal won the best performance award of the 2020 RoboCup@Home Education challenge.