Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems (A2S)
b-it-bots win the RoboCup World Championship 2009 in the @Home League
The b-it-bots returned triumphant from the RoboCup 2009 championships held in Graz, Austria (June, 26th – July, 5th 2009) as the world champion of the RoboCup@Home league. Johnny once again showed its capabilities as a service robot by performing quite well in the @Home league trials in an exciting competition in which 18 International teams participated. Johnny went head-to-head with the other robots in the preliminary stages of the competition. In stage I of the competition, Johnny was 25 points behind the er@ser team from Japan, but took the lead in stage II and came ahead of the NimbRo team from the University of Bonn. The five finalists of the @Home league were FLEA, homer, er@ser, NimbRo and b-it-bots.
In the final, Johnny was first introduced to his new surroundings and was then able to grasp a drink from the dinning table and deliver it to a guest. During the process of learning the new environment, the internal state of his map is updated and presented to the jury. Johnny also showed his speech recognition and facial identification capabilities. He revealed his newest feature, namely facial expression identification. All those features were packed into an “out of the box” robot to present the scenario in which a newly purchased robot is brought home and unpacked in a new environment.
As usual, Johnny was accompanied and supported by his entourage of six students in the master’s program in autonomous systems, 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 Bonn-Aachen International Center of Information Technology.
The RoboCup@Home League is becoming a standard benchmark for service robotics and finds the interest of a growing number of research groups.