Robotics team from Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg wins world championship title at RoboCup in Brazil

The robotics team from Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg returns from the World Robotics Championships in Brazil with the world championship title. From 15 to 21 July, 250 teams from 37 countries competed against each other with their robots in Salvador on the Brazilian Atlantic coast. The RoboCup is regarded as the largest robot competition in the world. The world championship was organised in four categories. The best-known category is football, in which robot teams play autonomously with each other.

The robotics team from Sankt Augustin achieved its success in the working robot league. In this competition category, officially called "@work",the challenge is to master a series of tasks that can occur in industrial production. The robots have to orientate themselves fully autonomously on a course and recognise, grasp and transport objects. The students relied on a youBot robot from the Augsburg-based company KUKA. The robot was specially developed for scientific research and teaching. It consists of a platform and a robot arm and is highly manoeuvrable thanks to its special wheels. The youBot platform has been used in research and teaching at the university since 2010. Since then, many other models have been added for a wide variety of applications. 

The student robotics team "b-it-bots" has been around for almost as long and has - with frequently changing line-ups - had a long track record of success in international competitions. Its greatest successes to date include the world championship titles in 2019 and 2023. 

"Winning the world championship again is testament to the high level of expertise and exceptional commitment of the entire b-it-bots team. I therefore congratulate the entire team from the bottom of my heart," says Professor Sascha Alda, Dean of the Department of Computer Science.

The final was very exciting at times for Gokul Krishna Gandhi Chenchani, Ayusee Swain, Anudeep Sai Sajja and Amirhossein Soltani. The students on the Master's degree programme in Autonomous Systems were in a neck-and-neck race with the SWOT team from the Würzburg-Schweinfurt University of Applied Sciences. Before the final stage, the four Sankt Augustin students were still 225 points behind, but were then able to overtake their strong rivals with almost flawless runs.

In the end, they scored 9551 points and were therefore able to place their youBot on the top step of the podium. With their score, the students also set a new record: Never before has a team with a working robot achieved a higher score in a RoboCup championship.

Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems have been a research focus at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg for more than 20 years. The Master's degree programme in Autonomous Systems, whose students make up the b-it-bots team, was the first of its kind in Germany. The university founded a new institute in 2023 to bring together and expand research in the fields of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. The A2S institute is based at the Department of Computer Science and is concerned with various application areas such as logistics, healthcare and agile manufacturing.