The research group Nao-Team Humboldt was founded at the end of 2007 and consists of students and researchers at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, coming from a number of different countries during the last years, in particular from Germany, Italy, Russia, Egypt, China, Iraq, and Iran. The team is a part of the AI research Lab of the Humboldt-Universität which is headed by Prof. Dr. Hans-Dieter Burkhard and is led by Heinrich Mellmann. At the current state we have 2 Phd students and around 10 Master Students in the core team. Additionally we provide courses and seminars where the students solve tasks related to RoboCup. We have a long tradition within the RoboCup by working for the Four Legged league as a part of the GermanTeam in recent years, where we won the competition three times. The current team members are: Heinrich Mellmann, Yuan Xu, Thomas Krause, Claas-Norman Ritter, Florian Holzhauer, Marcus Scheunemann, Paul Schütte, Martin Schneider, Kirill Yasinovskiy, Luisa Jahn, Dominik Krienelke, Christian Rekittke. We started with Naos in May 2008 and achieved the 4. place at the competition in Suzhou 2008. We achieved 3. place in technical challenge at Graz 2009. In 2010, we won the 2. place at RomeCup/Rom, 1. Place in Athens/Greece, and 4. place at German Open 2010. In 2010 we first time participated simultaneously in SPL in Simulation 3D with the same code. In the 3D Simulation we won the German Open and the AutCup competitions and achieved the 2. place at the RoboCup World Championship 2010 in Singapore. In 2011 we won the Iran Open competition in SPL and got 4. place in Simulation 3D, at the German Open we got 4. place as well. With our efforts in both leagues, we hope to foster the cooperation between the two leagues and to improve both of them. We also cooperate with several other teams and associate projects at different universities, e.g., we regularly make test games with the humanoid team FUManoids. Our general research fields include agent oriented techniques and machine learning with their applications to cognitive robotics. As our record shows, our results are recognized outside RoboCup as well. Our current research focuses among others mainly on the following topics:

An appropriate architecture (i.e., framework) is the base of each successful heterogeneous software project. It enables a group of developers to work at the same project and to organize their solutions. From this point of view, the artificial intelligence and/or robotics related research projects are usually more complicated, since the actual result of the project is often not clear. In particular, a strong organization of the software is necessary if the project is involved in education. At present, there are several different leagues in RoboCup, which focus on different subtasks. However, there are only few solutions working simultaneously in different leagues. A framework, which is able to run on different platforms can help to achieve this. Obviously, there is no perfect framework which could satisfy all the needs of the developers. In this project we propose a modular software architecture designed to implement an autonomous agent. In particular, it is used to develop software which is used simultaneously at several platforms, e.g., humanoid robot, simulated agent. One of the main aspects considered in our design is a strong code modularization which allows for re-usability, transparency and easily testing. Other important aspects are real-time applicability and simple usage. As a former member of the German Team our team has more than 10 years history in RoboCup and thus also large experience in building of software frameworks for autonomous robots. At the moment, our team — Nao Team Humboldt participates in both, SPL and S3L with the common core of our program [1]. Therewith, we want to foster the cooperation between the two leagues and to improve both of them. In the S3L, we won the German Open and the AUTCup competitions and achieved the 2. place at the RoboCup World Championship 2010 in Singapore; in the SPL, we won the Greek RoboCup Championship SETN 2010 and achieved 2. place at Mediterranean Open in Rome 2010, and 4. place GermanOpen Magdeburg 2010.

An appropriate architecture (i.e., framework) is the base of each successful heterogeneous software project. It enables a group of developers to work at the same project and to organize their solutions. From this point of view, the artificial intelligence and/or robotics related research projects are usually more complicated, since the actual result of the project is often not clear. In particular, a strong organization of the software is necessary if the project is involved in education. Obviously, there is no perfect framework which could satisfy all the needs of the developers. In this paper we present a modular software architecture designed to implement an autonomous agent. In particular, it is used to develop software which is used simultaneously at several platforms (e.g., humanoid robot, simulated agent). One of the main aspects considered in our design is a strong code modularization which allows for re-usability, transparency and easily testing. Other important aspects are real-time applicability and simple usage. This paper presents the main concepts and the particular implementation of the important parts. We also provide a qualitative comparison with other existing robotics frameworks.

The NAO-Team Humboldt was founded at the end of 2007 and consists of stu-dents and researchers from the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. Some of theteam members have had a long tradition within RoboCup by working for theFour Legged league as a part of the GermanTeam in recent years. Though weused some concepts and ideas from the GT-platform, the software architecturewas written totally new. Additionally, we developed several tools such as Robot-Control and MotionEditor for testing, debugging or for creating new motionnets.