The RoboCup German Open is an annual competition among various leagues. In the @HomeLeague, for example, service robots made to assist care patients in their everyday activities undergo competitive testing in nine trials to demonstrate their usefulness in realistic home environments. Their required tasks are: greeting and introducing visitors, helping with luggage, enforcing house rules, putting away groceries and other purchased items, cleaning a kitchen and serving guests in a restaurant. In doing so the robots demonstrate how successfully they are able to interact with users through speech and body language, to navigate close environments on their own and to grasp, move and set down household objects.
In the two most challenging trials, the task to be completed is communicated by voice command. The University of Bonn team deployed two mobile robots with an androidal/anthropomorphic upper body for these tasks. The robots perceive their surroundings via camera, laser scanner and microphone and use the data thus gathered in operating numerous motors and a speaker to independently perform assistive tasks. Methods derived from AI research play a key role in image and language comprehension, action and movement planning and dialogue systems, for example.
Two new capabilities secured victory in the finale
NimbRo had already taken a clear lead in the preliminary round, which was extended in the main round of competition. In the final, the University of Bonn robots showed off two all-new capabilities: closing a wardrobe door and opening a front door. In the overall performance evaluation, NimbRo scored nearly three times the number of points earned by the second-place team ToBI of Bielefeld University.
“In the future, assistive robots will be important in helping assisted living patients live longer on their own in their familiar home environment,” says University of Bonn Professor Sven Behnke, who is head of the Autonomous Intelligent Systems working group, Director of the Institute of Computer Science, Department VI – Intelligent Systems and Robotics and a member of the Transdisciplinary Research Areas (TRA) Modelling and Sustainable Futures, of the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence, of the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence and of the Center for Robotics.
Further information:
RoboCup German Open 2025:
https://robocup.de/german-open/?lang=en1
The domestic robots of the University of Bonn’s team NimbRo:
