Prediction of a Ball Trajectory for the Humanoid Robots: A Friction-Based Study

Abstract

Recent advances in robotics have made it necessary for robots to be able to predict actions like humans. This problem is well presented in international RoboCup competition leagues, especially for humanoid robots in challenges such as Goal-Kick from Moving Ball. In this paper, we proposed double exponential smoothing (DES), autoregressive (AR) and quadratic prediction (QP) as online methods and self-perturbing recursive least squares (SPRLS) as an offline method for prediction of the ball trajectory on ground. These prediction methods are compared in two scenarios by applying LuGre friction model. We simulated our proposed methods by Simmechanics library of MATLAB’s Simulink. By comparing results using root-mean-square error and normalized root-mean-square error, we could deduce that methods that were based on predefined models such as QP performed poorly when the friction deviated from the presumed model. Whereas numerical methods such as AR could adapt themselves to variation much better, depending on the friction force variation with time. Also offline methods such as SPRLS are good replacements for online ones when pre-training is possible.