SocRob@Home, a team composed of students from Instituto Superior Técnico and researchers from the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa), reached the second position at the RoboCup@Home, one of the world’s biggest robotics and artificial intelligence competition. The event took place from July 4th to 10th, in Bordeaux (France), featuring robots for domestic environments.

The team achieved the best performance ever of Técnico / ISR-Lisboa, and was the only group that scored in one of the most difficult tasks in this competition, the GPSR (General Purpose Service Robot).

To get this result, the team had to overcome obstacles of great difficulty, such as to impress a jury that would evaluate the project’s capacity for innovation, but also the dynamics of human-robot interaction in domestic environments.

Pedro Lima, president of ISR-Lisboa, DEEC professor and team coordinator, explains “the team excelled in the most complex task of the competition, in which the robot has to understand voice commands given by a human user with whom it interacts”, stressing “it was the only team out of 15 to do so”.

The team comprises the Técnico students Afonso Certo, Carlos Azevedo, Catarina Caramalho, Diogo Silva, Dmytro Kotenko, Miguel Nabais, Patrícia Torres, Pedro Sarnadas, Raphäel Colcombet, Rodrigo Serra, Rui Bettencourt and Thijs Verbroken, involved in the PhD Programme in Electrical and Computer Engineering, MSc programme in Aerospace Engineering, MSc programme in Electrical and Computer Engineering and MSc programme in Computer Science and Engineering.

SocRob@Home is an active team of SocRob, a long-term project created at ISR-Lisboa. The team started participating in RoboCup Soccer competitions but, over time, it has encompassed a broad range of efforts towards a team of robots to perform tasks with a particular focus on participation in scientific competitions. The Técnico podcast “110 Stories | 110 Objects”, episode 41, highlighted the project and history of SocRob.