[robocup-humanoid] ROS-based Software Framework for the NimbRo-OP Humanoid Open Platform

[Sven Behnke]

Dear Humanoid League Teams,

team NimbRo is pleased to announce the release of a ROS-based software 
framework for the NimbRo-OP humanoid open platform.

ROS (Robot Operating System) is a popular middleware for developing 
robot application software that is used by many research groups.

Our release provides functionality for hardware abstraction, visual 
perception, and behavior generation.
We used the framework to implement basic soccer skills, like 
omnidirectional walking, kicking, and getting up
which have been demonstrated by the NimbRo-OP in the Humanoid TeenSize 
competition at RoboCup 2013.

The software is available here:
https://github.com/NimbRo/nimbro-op-ros

The framework is documented in the following paper:

Philipp Allgeuer, Max Schwarz, Julio Pastrana, Sebastian Schueller, 
Marcell Missura and Sven Behnke:
"A ROS-based Software Framework for the NimbRo-OP Humanoid Open Platform"
In Proceedings of 8th Workshop on Humanoid Soccer Robots, IEEE-RAS 
International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Atlanta, October 2013.
http://www.ais.uni-bonn.de/papers/HSR13_Allgeuer_ROS_NimbRo-OP.pdf

Further information on the NimbRo-OP robot is available here:
http://www.nimbro.net/OP

Due to the generic nature of our software, it should be easy to apply 
the software framework to similar humanoid soccer robots such as the 
DARwIn-OP.

Kind regards,

Sven Behnke.
http://www.ais.uni-bonn.de/behnke