At the beginning of the year, a team composed of students from Instituto Superior Técnico and researchers from the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa) was selected to participate in RoboCup23, the “Champions League” of robotics competitions. This year the international competition will take place from 4th to 10th July, in Bordeaux (France) and will be attended by over 2500 participants and 40 thousand visitors from several countries.
The RoboCup is considered the world’s biggest robotics competition and aims to promote interest, practice and knowledge of the related sciences: mechatronics, computer science, electronics, mechanics, the internet of things and artificial intelligence. Organised around competitive leagues representing scientific research fields, the event brings together thousands of researchers around a common ambition: to share knowledge and advance technical and scientific progress.
SocRob@Home is an active team of SocRob, a long-term project created at ISR-Lisboa. The team started participating in RoboCup Soccer competitions but, over time, it has encompassed a broad range of efforts towards a team of robots to perform tasks with a particular focus on the participation in scientific competitions. The Técnico podcast “110 Stories | 110 Objects”, episode 41, highlighted the project and history of SocRob.
The RoboCup will not be the only competition in which the team will participate in 2023. The students are already preparing for the National Robotics Festival, which will take place in Tomar, from 28th to 30th April, and for the euROBIN Hackathon, in Seville, from 13th to 19th May.
Carlos Azevedo, PhD student and “captain” of the team, explains “SocRob’s goal is to have the best performance possible in all competitions, but the FNR and the Hackathon will allow us to evaluate the algorithms in a real environment, in order to be as well prepared as possible for RoboCup competition“. “Right now, six members of our team are preparing their Masters theses. This type of competitions helps motivate and encourage knowledge sharing and provide a very demanding testing platform, not only because it is an environment we are not familiar with, but also because the team’s performance is evaluated by external and impartial referees,” he adds.
The Técnico team is accepting new partners and sponsors who want to help boost its activities and contribute to its ambitious mission: the first victory of a team from Técnico in RoboCup.
