Current and Future Challenges in Humanoid Robotics -- An Empirical Investigation

TL;DR

This paper surveys the RoboCup community to identify current priorities and challenges in humanoid robotics, highlighting locomotion, awareness, and robustness as key focus areas for future development.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into community perceptions of the most important and challenging aspects of humanoid robotics for the next decade and beyond.

Findings

Locomotion, awareness, and robustness are top priorities.

Human-robot interaction and natural language processing are seen as less important and difficult.

Survey data from 39 community members reveal consensus on key challenges.

Abstract

The goal of RoboCup is to make research in the area of robotics measurable over time, and grow a community that works together to solve increasingly difficult challenges over the years. The most ambitious of these challenges it to be able to play against the human world champions in soccer in 2050. To better understand what members of the RoboCup community believes to be the state of the art and the main challenges in the next decade and towards the 2050 game, we developed a survey and distributed it to members of different experience level and background within the community. We present data from 39 responses. Results highlighted that locomotion, awareness and decision-making, and robustness of robots are among those considered of high importance for the community, while human-robot interaction and natural language processing and generation are rated of low in importance and difficulty.