In RoboCup, robots must make quick decisions under uncertainty. To this end, this paper introduces a new approach to enable humanoid soccer robots to execute kicks quickly and ensure that they move the ball down field. This paper presents a kick engine capable of kicking at a variety of distances and angles and then describes a novel kick decision method for selecting from among a large set of possible kicks. This method prunes and orders the kicks according to a metric and then chooses the first possible kick that ensures that our field position is improved. For the RoboCup 2010 challenge events, we took a more cautious approach, taking additional time to line up the ball and being more conservative in our kick selection. These methods proved successful at RoboCup 2010, as our UT Austin Villa team came in third in the soccer competition and second in the challenges.

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In The Fifth Workshop on Humanoid Soccer Robots at Humanoids 2010, Nashville, TN 2010.

@InProceedings{HUMANOIDS10-barrett, title={Controlled Kicking under Uncertainty}, author={Samuel Barrett and Katie Genter and Todd Hester and Michael Quinlan and Peter Stone}, booktitle={The Fifth Workshop on Humanoid Soccer Robots at Humanoids 2010}, address={Nashville, TN}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?HUMANOIDS10-barrett", year={2010} }