From 24 to 28 November, the French city of Nancy hosted the euROBIN Robotics Competition. The event brought together 32 European research groups, 50 robots, 18 robotics teams and around 500 scientists and professionals in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics. A team of researchers at Instituto Superior Técnico and Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa) – the SocRob@Home team – were part of the organising committee and received an honorary third place in this scientific competition.
Rodrigo Serra, SocRob@Home team leader and euROBIN researcher, explained more about the involvement of Técnico: “We participated in the Service Robots League to tackle one of the greatest challenges in robotics: developing software modules that are reusable across robot platforms and tasks, with exceptional flexibility and robustness to differences. Beyond the competition, we had the privilege of collaborating and learning alongside some of Europe’s finest institutions, including the German Aerospace Center, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, INRIA and many others.”
The euROBIN Competition was held within the prestigious HUMANOIDS 2024 conference to showcase Europe’s latest advancements in robotics and AI, in three key areas: industrial manipulation, outdoor navigation, and domestic interaction.
Pedro Lima, a professor at Técnico, president of ISR-Lisboa, and main researcher responsible for euROBIN noticed: “the relevance and impact of the ISR/IST team contributions should not be underestimated: the concept of coopetition (cooperative competition) as a means to motivate teams to develop easily transferable and reusable modules in robot systems, was warmly praised by the Chair of the EC Unit on Excellence on AI and Robotics and the project reviewers in the social networks, underlining that this could be a novel concept to be used in all EU-funded projects in Robotics.”
The event highlighted a range of cutting-edge technologies through live demonstrations, cooperative competitions, and public engagement activities, including workshops, guided tours, and round tables.
SocRob@Home, a team of Técnico students and ISR-Lisboa researchers, has won awards such as a podium finish at RoboCup 2024 and second place at RoboCup@Home in 2023.
*This text was written in collaboration with the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa)
