The Cognitive Robotics Laboratory of the University of Groningen

BORG - The RoboCup@Home team of the University of Groningen

The BORG team resides at the Artificial Intelligence department in the institute for Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. BORG is the first Dutch team in the RoboCup@Home league, last year our team was a combined Dutch/French team called the Radical Dudes.

The team is composed of students and faculty members from the department of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. The BORG team is named after the small castles, typically built on small hills, that surround the Groningen province.

RoboCup@Home is the ultimate international benchmark in the area of domestic service robots. We go shopping with our robots in the shopping mall, talk with our robots and of course they also have to clean our apartments besides many more tasks.

These tasks require that the students are trained in pattern recognition on sensor data, human-robot interaction, actuator control and much more. Our team consists of approximately 10-20 persons. We use development techniques from eXtreme Programming during our development. But the most important aspect of the project is that we do it because it is fun to do!

Our approach is to combine a Pioneer robot platform with a humanoid Nao robot sitting on top of it. The Nao is cute and the Pioneer is fast. This is an excellent combination where we can do what we are good at: developing Artificial Intelligence software.