The development of a versatile, fully-capable humanoid robot as envisioned in science fiction books is one of the most challenging but interesting issues in the robotic field. Currently, existing humanoid robots are designed with different purposes and applications in mind. In humanoid robot development process, each robot is designed with various characteristics, abilities, and equipment, which influence the general structure, cost, and difficulty of development. Even though humanoid robot development is very popular, a few review papers are focusing on the design and development process of humanoid robots. Motivated by this, we present this review paper to show variations in the requirements, design, and development process and also propose a taxonomy of existing humanoid robots. It aims at demonstrating a general perspective of existing humanoid robots’ characteristics and applications. This paper includes state-of-the-art and successfully reported existing humanoid robot designs along with different robots used in various robot competitions.

This paper describes the motivation for the development of the HuroCup competition and follows the rule development from its inaugural competition from 2002 to 2015. The history of HuroCup is broken down into its growing phase (2002–2006), a time of explosive growth (2007–2011), and current times. This paper describes the main research focus of HuroCup, the multi-event humanoid robot competition: (a) active balancing, (b) complex motion planning, and (c) human–robot interaction and shows how the various HuroCup events relate to those research topics. This paper concludes with some medium- and long-term goals of the rule development for HuroCup.

In the last two decades various intelligent robotics competitions have become very popular. Arguably the most well-known of these are the robotic soccer competitions. In addition to their value in attracting media and capturing the minds of the general public, these competitions also provide benchmark problems for various robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. As with any benchmark, care must be taken that the benchmark does not introduce unwarranted biases. This paper critically evaluates the AI contributions made by various robotic competitions on AI research.

This paper presents our preliminary research into the autonomous control of an alpine skiing robot. Based on our previous experience with active balancing on difficult terrain and developing an ice-skating robot, we have implemented a simple control system that allows the humanoid robot Jennifer to steer around a simple alpine skiing course, brake, and actively control the pitch and roll of the skis in order to maintain stability on hills with variable inclination. The robot steers and brakes by using the edges of the skis to dig into the snow, by inclining both skis to one side the robot can turn in an arc. By rolling the skis outward and pointing the toes together the robot creates a snowplough shape that rapidly reduces its forward velocity. To keep the skis in constant contact with the hill we use two independent proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers to continually adjust the robot’s inclination in the frontal and sagittal planes. Our experiments show that these techniques are sufficient to allow a small humanoid robot to alpine ski autonomously down hills of different inclination with variable snow conditions.