Learning to kick the ball using back to reality

Abstract

Kicking the ball with high power, short reaction time and accuracy are fundamental requirements for any soccer player. Human players acquire these fine low-level sensory motor coordination abilities trough extended training periods that might last for years. In RoboCup the problem has been addressed by engineering design and acceptable, probably sub-optimal, solutions have been found. To our knowledge the automatic development of these abilities has not been yet employed. Certainly no one is willing to damage a robot during an extended, and probably violent, evolutionary learning process in a real environment. In this work we present an approach for the automatic generation (from scratch) of ball-kick behaviors for legged robots. The approach relies on the use of UCHILSIM, a dynamically accurate simulator, and the Back to Reality paradigm to evolutionary robotics, a recently proposed method for narrowing the difference between simulation and reality during robot behavior execution. After eight hours of simulations successful ball-kick behaviors emerged, being directly transferable to the real robot. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.