HR4RS stamp
Alberto Sanchez Lozano
RoboCup Home Education is an educational initiative of RoboCup, an entity that promotes robotics and artificial intelligence research. One of the effective ways to promote research in science and engineering is to set challenging long-term goals that generate significant social impacts. The RoboCup Home Education proposal aims to develop an assistive robot service and technology for future personal home applications. To show the possible uses of robotics in domestic service, the institution organizes competitions where robotics students, as well as amateurs, can show their creations.
This weekend the European Robotics League, organized by RoboCup Home Education, was held in Trieste, Italy, and in which four undergraduate students from the URJC ended up winning together with a doctoral student, Jonatan Ginés, 'Team leader' of the URJC team.
The competition, which took place from Thursday to Sunday morning, consisted of several tests to check the programming, functions and autonomy of the robot. The first test consisted of the robot helping the person to transport an object to a certain place. The robot obeyed the voice command assigned by its programmers, and this test was used to measure speech recognition, speech comprehension, and navigation capabilities.
The second test of the event consisted of exclusively measuring the ability to locate objects and navigate the space of a house, in addition to voice recognition and understanding. A task in which the person stood a meter and a half away behind the robot, so that the robot had to turn towards the person's position and correctly answer a question.
The third exercise consisted of the robot going to a known location of the person, and asking him if he wanted any object. The robot went to the location of what had been asked, unknown to him, recognize it, say the name of the object and take it to the person. A very complete final test in which all the functions of the service robot were put to the test.
The URJC team's robot was the best in all activities and managed to win the first prize in the competition, which entitles them to participate in Sydney from July 2 to July 8 in the world robotics event. During the event, robotics workshops and exhibitions of various functionalities of this type of robots were also held, to disseminate and show the capabilities of this type of machine.
opportunity to learn
For the undergraduate students who accompanied Jonatan Ginés, the experience was enriching in many ways. "Both on an educational level and on a personal level, all these experiences are very enriching. We cannot limit ourselves to university classes, your vision of the world. We need problem-solving capacity and practical skills, which are more limited and more difficult to learn. See that more people from different parts of the world meet to do the same things that you like and the atmosphere of brotherhood that is generated is not comparable to what you can learn inside four walls", the four analyze.
These students agree that "these activities are the ones that generate not only academic excellence, but also personal excellence. Compete fairly, learn to work under pressure, respect the other and meet people of other nationalities, cultures and thoughts that share with you passion for what they do and want to improve, makes me like what we study more and more and we are clearer that this is the labor sector in which we want to work".