Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems (A2S)
b-it-bots bring home gold from the RoboCup@Home league at German Open 2009
The b-it-bots, the RoboCup@Home team of the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, won 1st place at the German Open 2009 championship on 24 April. The competition took place at the Hannover Fair.
The RoboCup@Home League is a competition for service robotics that takes place in an environment of several furnished rooms. During the course of the competition, these rooms are changed several times. The robot must independently and safely find and navigate around these rooms autonomously. It can recognize objects, learn their names and remember the places where the objects are located. The robots of the advanced teams can also manipulate the objects and move them. Objects to be learned and recognized can be the faces of the residents and their guests. The residents interact with the robots via natural spoken language, even if it is in an environment with loud background noise, and many are available. The sounds of the world’s largest industrial trade fair presented a particular challenge to the robots.
The start of the exciting competition saw four German and an Austrian team started with a head-to-head race. The b-it-bots team was leading the scoreboard due to its greater experience and more robust performance. The team was closely followed by the Nimbro team of the University of Bonn who were participating in this league for the first time.
In the final test and in the Open Challenge, the scoring is decided upon by an external expert panel which often provides some surprising changes in the scoreboard. Johnny and his b-it-bots team successfully impressed the judges by recognizing a member of the public, who he’d become aquatinted with at the beginning of the final test, and offered him the packet of potato chips which he had previously brought from the kitchen.
Johnny was accompanied and supported by his entourage of six master of Autonomous Systems students - Dirk Holz, Thomas Breuer, Geovanny Giorgiana, Zha Jin, Christian Müller and Frederik Hegger; two research associates - Ronny Hartanto and Jan Paulus, along with two professors - Paul Plöger and Gerhard Kraetzschmar. The team is supported by the B-IT Bonn-Aachen International Center of Information Technology.
The RoboCup@Home League is becoming a standard benchmark for service robotics and attracts the interest of a growing number of research groups. This July, the World RoboCup Championships for 2009 will be held in held in Graz, Austria. In the RoboCup@Home league, 23 teams will be competing for the title. This is two-fold increase in the number of competitors since last year’s championship. The b-it-bots face tough competition from teams from Japan, China and several European countries. With lots of preparation ahead of them for July, this German saying rings true: "After the game is before the game!"