SocRob@Home, a team comprised of students from Instituto Superior Técnico and researchers from the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa), reached the podium once again at RoboCup 2024, one of the world’s largest robotics and artificial intelligence championship. After winning second place last year, the team ranked third this year.
RoboCup is considered the premier event to compete in robotics, featuring 17 competitions across five categories, from soccer to care robots. The Técnico SocRob@Home team has participated in this competition for several years.
This year, entering the finals in second place, the team faced fierce competition from “Tidy Boys” of Pusan National University and Seoul National University, South Korea—last year’s champions—and Nimbro@Home from the University of Bonn, Germany, known for their consistent victories in international competitions
Pedro Lima, a professor at Técnico, president of ISR-Lisboa and the team’s coordinator commented that this result follows a consistent series of good presences in RoboCup@Home in the last few years: 4th place in 2018 and 2020, and 2nd place in 2023. “As always, this is the result of the excellent team of students (PhD, MSc, Sc), research engineers and lab technicians working as a team, under pressing deadlines and requiring much creativity and problem solving skills.”
SocRob@Home ranked in the top 3 out of 17 teams from prominent universities such as Tsinghua University (China), EPFL (Switzerland), National Autonomous University of Mexico, Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico), Lincoln University (United Kingdom), and institutions like SoftBank Robotics and CATIE (French Tech Center).
SocRob initially focused on Robotic Soccer competitions and the project has since expanded to encompass a variety of robotics tasks, with a significant emphasis on scientific competitions.
* This text was written in collaboration with the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa)
