A competitive and cooperative humanoid software developing scheme LoE and its improvements

DARPA Robotics Challenge left not only technology development in the humanoid field but also increase of the attention on humanoids and the motivation to become a humanoid developer to people. However, the reality is not so simple. To develop a humanoid which has enough DOF and performance, it costs too much and most people in the world cannot own one. In this research, we propose the LoE (League of Everybody) to improve this situation. The LoE is an internet based open software development architecture especially for humanoid. It provides people with a real humanoid and people are able to treat the robot as if they are actually owning it. A humanoid provided by the LoE is time-shared by people through the LoE and people develop software for the robot to challenge the given target task from the LoE. This scheme is able to satisfy both the people who are interested in humanoids and the humanoid technology field. In this paper, the early results of the LoE and current improvements to overcome the problems found from the beta tests are shown and described.