[robocup-nao] Paper on RoboCup Nao-based platforms

[Peter Stone]

** Apologies for duplicates **

Colleagues,

I'd like to point your attention towards a paper that we will be
publishing in this year's RoboCup Symposium proceedings regarding
three of the Nao-based RoboCup platforms.  I hope that those of you on
these lists will find it interesting and that it may play a role in
this year's technical discussions at RoboCup.

The paper can be found at

  http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pstone/Papers/bib2html/b2hd-LNAI09-kalyanakrishnan-2.html

I'm including the title and abstract below.  Feedback of any kind is
most welcome.  Meanwhile, I look forward to seeing many of you in Graz.

Best Regards,
     Peter (for Shivaram, Todd, Michael, and Yinon)

==============================

Three Humanoid Soccer Platforms: Comparison and Synthesis

Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Todd Hester, Michael Quinlan, Yinon Bentor,
and Peter Stone.  In Proceedings of the RoboCup International
Symposium 2009.

In this article, we provide an overview of three humanoid soccer
platforms currently in use at RoboCup: 3D simulation, the humanoid
Standard Platform League (SPL), and the Webots-based simulator
released with the SPL. Although these platforms trace different
historical roots, today they share the same robot model, the Aldebaran
Nao. Consequently, they face a similar set of challenges, primary
among which is the need to develop reliable and robust bipedal
locomotion. In this paper, we compare and contrast these platforms,
drawing on the experiences of our team, UT Austin Villa, in developing
agents for each of them. We identify specific roles for these three
platforms in advancing the overarching goals of RoboCup.