Development of an augmented environment and autonomous learning for quadruped robots

This paper describes an interactive experimental environment for autonomous soccer robots, which is a soccer field augmented by utilizing camera input and projector output. This environment, in a sense, plays an intermediate role between simulated environments and real environments. We can simulate some parts of real environments, e.g., real objects such as robots or a ball, and reflect simulated data into the real environments, e.g., to visualize the positions on the field, so as to create a situation that allows easy debugging of robot programs. As an application in the augmented environment, we address the learning of goalie strategies on real quadruped robots in penalty kicks. Our robots learn and acquire sophisticated strategies in a fully simulated environment, and then they autonomously adapt to real environments in the augmented environment.