Newton: A High Level Control Humanoid Robot for the RoboCup Soccer KidSize League

One of the goals of humanoid robot researchers is to develop a complete – in terms of hardware and software – artificial autonomous agent able to interact with humans and to act in the contemporary world, that is built for human beings. There has been an increasing number of humanoid robots in the last years, including Aldebaran’s NAO and Romeo, Intel’s Jimmy and Robotis’ DARwIn-OP. This research article describes the project and development of a new humanoid robot named Newton, made for research purposes and also to be used in the RoboCup Soccer KidSize League Competition. Newton robot’s contributions include that it has been developed to work without a dedicated microcontroller board, using an four-by-four-inch Intel NUC board, that is a fully functioning PC. To work with this high level hardware, a new software architecture comprised of completely independent processes was proposed. This architecture, called Cross Architecture, is comprised of completely independent processes, one for each intelligent system required by a soccer player: Vision, Localization, Decision, Communication, Planning, Sense and Acting, besides having a process used for managing the others. The experiments showed that the robot could walk, find the ball in an unknown position, recover itself from a fall and kicking the ball autonomously with a good performance.