Optimizing Simulated Humanoid Robot Skills

Controlling a humanoid robot with a large number of joints and thus, degrees of freedom, presents a complex problem that requires knowledge in multiple fields, including biology, mechanics, physics, electronics and computer engineering. Soccer, a task that was created specifically for humans, requires not just precise and complex motor skills from an individual, but also strategy, planning and cooperation between the elements of the same team. The technologies involved in allowing a team of robots to play soccer span the main areas of artificial intelligence such as design principles of autonomous agents, multiagent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning and planning and intelligent robotics. The potential social and economic impact of significant developments in these areas coupled with the benefits of having a standard problem for researchers across the world to compete and collaborate, ultimately lead to the creation of the RoboCup initiative. This work aims to improve the performance of motor skills such as getting up, kicking the ball and walking developed by the FC Portugal3D team by applying to them an automated optimization process.