b-it-bots win second place at RoboCup 2021

The two b-it-bots teams from the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg achieved very good placements at the RoboCup World Championship 2021. The students from Sankt Augustin and their robots faced off against teams from all over the world in two disciplines. In the @work league, the still young H-BRS team was able to secure the runner-up title. In the @home league, the students won the fifth place against strong competition.

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The RoboCup World Championship 2021 was a premiere in its own way: the international robotics competition took place entirely online for the first time. In the previous year, it had been cancelled due to the pandemic. Now, with 316 teams and almost 2,000 participants, attendance at the tournament was as high as in previous years.

RoboCup@Work: Use in warehouses and in production

In the RoboCup@Work category, the b-it-bots team from the H-BRS came second, securing the runner-up title. The RoboCup@Work league is the youngest league of RoboCup, in which robots are used in work-related scenarios. The robots have to perform various types of work in warehouses and production facilities independently and find their way around on their own. The task is to correctly grab different objects, transport them and put them down again correctly and undamaged. The special challenge was now to recognise the objects on changing surfaces such as artificial turf or aluminium foil, which demanded a lot of development work from the teams.

Since the world championship could not take place face-to-face, each team had to set up a course in their home laboratory according to set rules and equip it with cameras. Via live transmission, everyone could follow how the robots mastered their tasks.

The league uses the Youbot robot platform from the company Kuka, and each team can modify the platform as they wish. Although the competition between the artificial work assistants has a high fun factor, the background is serious. Both classic and innovative robotics scenarios with a very high relevance for the robotics industry are being researched here.

A total of ten university teams from Singapore, Greece, Iran, the Netherlands and other countries competed against each other in the category with their autonomous robots. The 2021 World Champion title also went to Germany: the "AutonOHM" team from TH Nürnberg took the award, thereby replacing the b-it-bots@work team from H-BRS as the reigning world champion.

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RoboCup@Home: Service robots for the domestic environment

The b-it-bots team from the university came fifth in the RoboCup@Home category. This category focuses on the development of service and assistance robots for household applications. The RoboCup@Home league is the largest competition for autonomous household service robots. The task for the Toyota HSR robot programmed in Sankt Augustin was to perform simple household chores. This year, RoboCup@Home was a simulated competition: Robot "Lucy", programmed in Sankt Augustin, had to perform simple household chores in a simulated environment, recognising and matching objects lying on the floor. "Lucy" is 1.35 metres tall, weighs 37 kilograms and has a flexible gripper arm.

"Our robot did the job fairly well," says team captain Alex Mitrevski happily. "Unfortunately, due to some inaccuracies in object recognition, he misallocated and misplaced objects. He still has a lot to learn."

The b-it-bots teams are made up of students from the international master's programme Autonomous Systems at the H-BRS and their team captains (usually research associates). The interdisciplinary programme combines content from robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning as well as programming and prepares students to solve complex problems in robotics or other autonomous systems such as self-driving cars.

The RoboCup is an annual robotics competition that was first held in 1997. Originally, football was the focus of the global tournament, but competitions in other disciplines have since been added. The aim of the event is to promote the further development of intelligent robots. Alongside the competitions, a congress is held to discuss new scientific findings in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics.