Hyundai Motor on the 4th released behind-the-scenes details of the Humanoid Robot Atlas's "rabona kick" demonstration through a making-of film that captures the development process of School of Football.
Atlas, the Humanoid robot of Boston Dynamics, a robotics affiliate of Hyundai Motor Group, appeared performing various soccer moves, including a rabona kick striking the ball with crossed legs, in the School of Football campaign video released on the 29th.
The making-of film introduced the process and developers' behind-the-scenes work on how Atlas's soccer movements were implemented through research.
The researchers designed the Atlas training program inspired by biomechanical movement patterns of world-class soccer players, converting players' motions into trainable motion data and motion protocols and training Atlas on them.
First, the researchers collected soccer players' movements with motion capture and converted the motions to fit Atlas through retargeting, because even if Atlas resembles a person, its joint structure and range of motion are different.
They then used Reinforcement Learning to train the motions. In this process, the researchers had Atlas go beyond simple imitation and learn body physics and motor control methods so it could optimize balance and power transfer on its own.
In this process, Atlas trained by running thousands of simulations simultaneously in a cloud GPU environment. Through this parallel training, Atlas acquired movements by experiencing trial and error in just 24 hours equivalent to more than a year by human standards.
Motions trained in simulation were applied to the actual Atlas robot and were implemented stably from the first demonstration, and Hyundai Motor said performance continued to improve as errors that occurred during subsequent testing were fed back into training.
Atlas maintained balance with whole-body control technology and executed the kick motion with precise timing, enabling the performance of ball-kicking actions that are challenging for robots. The technology integrates control of all joints as if they were a single system.
The researchers judged that because soccer requires a complex combination of balance, timing, coordination, and precise movement, it is an optimal environment for a Humanoid to learn natural humanlike movements.
They also expect that the movements Atlas learned through soccer will not be limited to sports skills but will help advance robotics by developing capabilities such as timing, force generation, coordination, rotational motion, weight shifting, and whole-body control.
Hyundai Motor also sees that robot training in environments like soccer, where locomotion and manipulation are required simultaneously, could expand into task performance capabilities in logistics and manufacturing sites in the future.
Earlier, Atlas demonstrated whole-body control that stably handles heavy objects by lifting a refrigerator weighing about 23 kilograms and placing it on a table.
Hyundai Motor said, "We plan to continue advancing Atlas's movement capabilities through various challenges with Boston Dynamics."