The Bioloid Olympics Project was a competition that took place at the Institute for Cognitive Systems, Technical University Munich. 2 teams needed to develop control code on a standardised humanoid hardware platform (bioloid robot) which would them compete against each other in a few different 'events'. The events were running race, stair climbing and kungfu.

The bioloid robots consisted of 18 servo motors. Other than the position of the motors there was no feedback available. It was possible to control the robots with a keyboard or joystick, however this input was only used to issue higher order commands - start walk, turn right, climb step etc.

The code for the robots was developed using ROS and ran on a desktop computer which communicated with the robots over I2C 1 wire protocol. The codebase included serial communication with the servo motors, perform forward and inverse kinematic calculations, generating complex movements and incorporate balancing techniques to keep the robot stable. A framework was developed to accomplish all of this. The framework allowed paramaterization of movements (step height, length etc.) as well as being modular to easily incorperate new movements or modification of existing movements.

The running race and stair climbing event was based purely on which robot was fastest. The winner of the 'kungfu' event was judged based on which robot was more dominant. Our robot won in all three catagories.

The following video shows the capabilites of our robot and how they developed during the project.

Link to the code

Final Report

Final Presentation