RoboCup@Home main page

The RoboCup@Home league aims to develop service and assistive robot technology with high relevance for future personal domestic applications. It is the largest international annual competition for autonomous service robots and is part of the RoboCup initiative. A set of benchmark tests is used to evaluate the robots’ abilities and performance in a realistic non-standardized home environment setting. Focus lies on the following domains but is not limited to: Human-Robot-Interaction and Cooperation, Navigation and Mapping in dynamic environments, Computer Vision and Object Recognition under natural light conditions, Object Manipulation, Adaptive Behaviors, Behavior Integration, Ambient Intelligence, Standardization and System Integration. It is colocated with the RoboCup symposium.

Singapore 2010, Robots in the wild

This year (2010) the competition of RoboCup@Home is in Singapore. It will be a fantastic event. At the moment of writing (Jan 19) there are already 30 teams who told us that they want to participate. This is an increase of 50 percent compared to last year. This probably means that RoboCup@Home is the largest senior league within the RoboCup Foundation! We would like to thank all the teams from past and present who made this happen. You check out the movies from 2009 in Graz.
The deadline for the pre-registration is extendend (because the website could not be updated) untill 31st of January. Please pay attention to all the dates. The first test, the robot-inspection-poster-presentation (RIPS) will start on 20th of June at 1500h!

The new rulebook should be ready at the end of January. Some highlights:
For phase 1: 'Robot-Inspection-Poster-Session' aka RIPS, a test where the robot has to register itself while the team can give a presentation; 'follow me', the follow me test will be held in the real world outside the scenario; 'Go get it!', a test where two robots from different teams have to get stuff from different rooms; 'Dynamic Who's Who', people can sit, don't have to face the robot all the time.
For phase 2: the 'Demo Challenge' is a combination of the previous two years, combining a restaurant and a bar, with extra points if two teams from different countries participate together; 'Supermarket', hold your hats, we are planning to go into a real supermarket!; 'Enhanced Who's who', this includes gesture recognition from unknown persons; and a brand new test, called the 'General Purpose Robot' test, where the robot has to do all sorts of driving or walking, pointing and grabbing actions, testing the general intelligence of the robot.

The heroes of 2009

The real heroes of 2009

A RoboCup@Home movie

Who can participate?

Everybody with an autonomous robot can participate. The @Home league consists of some tests and an open challenge to demonstrate the abilities of your robot. To participate in the open challenge you have to participate in at least one test. The competition is in a real world scenario (see below).

Singapore 2010

The world championships are in Singapore in 2010. For local RoboCup@Home competition please have a look at the main RoboCup page to see if there is one near you.

The competition

The competition of RoboCup@Home consists of tests which the robots have to solve. The tests will change over the years to become more advanced and function as an overall quality measurement in desired areas. Suggestions for tests can be discussed on the email list. Performance measurement is based on a score derived from competition rules and evaluation by a jury.

Criteria of the tests are listed below. The tests should:

include human machine interaction
be socially relevant
be application directed/oriented
be scientifically challenging
be easy to set up and low in costs
be simple and have self-explaining rules
be interesting to watch
take a small amount of time

Suggestions for new tests or changes in existing tests should fulfill as many of these criteria as possible. Suggestions can be mailed to the @Home email list (see menu on the left).

The Scenario

The ultimate scenario is the real world itself. To build up the required technologies gradually a basic home environment is provided as a general scenario. In the first years (we started in 2006) it will consist of a living room and a kitchen but soon it should also involve other areas of daily life, such as a garden/park area, a shop, a street or other public places. In 2009 we are hope to get to a real supermarket setting to do some shopping!

Open Challenge

One of the tests is an open challenge where freely chosen abilities can be shown. Also, in the open challenge proposals for future tests can be presented to the league. According to the criteria of RoboCup@Home, a jury consisting of team leaders will decide on the score awarded.

Finals

RoboCup@Home finishes with the finals where the 5 teams with the highest scores can perform in the scenario that has been set up. The teams are rated by a jury consisting of roboticists and non roboticists, such as people from industry, from human-machine interaction, from industrial design, from the audience and the press. The ranking of the finals determines the winner. In the finals there is less focus on technical matters, since getting in the finals already means that the teams are very good on the technical level.