b-it-bots on the podium again at RoboCup@Home 2010

The b-it-bots team continues its success story: On Thursday, June 24th, 2010, for the third time in as many years, the b-it-bots have successfully taken their place as one of the ‘Top 3’ teams in the world and brought home the sixth trophy from the sixth competition that Johnny has competed in! The team took third place at the RoboCup World Championship 2010 in Singapore in the RoboCup@Home league.

The b-it-bots thereby once again demonstrated their strength on an international level after taking gold at the German Open in April.

The RoboCup@Home league is a competition for service robotics. It is fast becoming a standard benchmark for service robotics and is attracting the interest of more and more research groups. To advance scientific progress, the roles and rules of the contest are adapted and extended each year by a Technical Committee.

The competition tasks were changed quite a bit this year, so that the teams could use very little program code from the previous year.

The competing robots could cope independently in a living environment of several furnished rooms. The arrangement of the “apartment” is changed several times during the competition and still the robots can navigate in this environment safely and autonomously.

The robots recognize objects, learn their names and remember where they are placed.
The robots of the advanced teams could grasp and also transport the objects and could learn the faces of the residents and their guests as well as recognize them at a later time.
A special feature of our robot, Johnny, is its ability to recognize the emotional states of people. The residents of the “apartment” interact with the robots in a natural, spoken language, despite the loud background noise.

The background noise at the RoboCup competitions is always a special challenge, since it cannot be simulated realistically during the preparation in the laboratory. Therefore, efficient tests prior to competition are virtually impossible.

In an exciting competition with 24 teams from four continents, the b-it-bots were off to a bad start in the preliminary round. Despite the intensive preparations at the b-it-bots’ lab back at BRSU, which included preparations with guest teams from the universities of Bonn, Koblenz and Lyon at the first ever RoboCup@Home Camp in March 2010, and despite a successful robot registration (where the team was awarded the highest score) the next three tests went quite badly, and the b-it-bots fell back to fifth place.

With the team’s long experience and its great team spirit, the b-it-bots, finally successful, made their stunning comeback: the two closest competitors could be overtaken in the end. In a perfectly coordinated final Johnny’s abilities as a robot waiter were demonstrated.

The finals were being judged by a high-level panel of experts who could have still changed the outcome quite a bit.

Johnny received the guests at the entrance of a mock restaurant, led them to their tables, fetched the items from the kitchen that they had ordered from the menu, selected music to match their ‘mood’ and helped to evacuate the restaurant following a simulated fire in the kitchen by escorting the guests safely from the restaurant. For this impressive final, the b-it-bots were accorded second place by the jury, which put the team back on the podium and into 3rd place.

The team consists of eight students of the international master’s programme in autonomous systems – Thomas Breuer, Geovanny Giorgana, Zha Jin, Christian Müller, Frederik Hegger, Shashank Sharma, Shahmi Junoh and Jose Ruiz and six research assistants – Dr. Ronny Hartanto, Jan Paulus, Michael Reckhaus, Nico Hochgeschwender, Azamat Shakhimardanov and Iman Awaad.

The supervising professors are Paul G. Plöger and Gerhard K. Kraetzschmar. The team is being supported by b-it Bonn-Aachen International Center of Information Technology and is sponsored by the president of BRSU, the Department of Computer Science, the Association of friends and sponsors of BRSU, PMD Tech. Siegen, and DAAD. Ten of the seventeen members of the team represented the b-it-bots in Singapore.