The RoboCup World Championship took place in the Japanese city of Nagoya, where it had been held for the first time twenty years ago. More than 3,500 researchers, students and students from 40 countries participated in competitions in robot football and application-oriented leagues. In the humanoid league, human-shaped robots are moving together, which are completely autonomous. The contests are held in the following categories: KidSize (under 60 centimeters), TeenSize (100 to 140 centimeters) and AdultSize (over 130 centimeters).
The star of this year's RoboCup World Championship is NimbRo-OP2 - a new robot from Bonn that dominated the AdultSize class. The strongest opponent was follow countryman "Sweaty", which the Offenburg University of Applies Sciences had sent into the race. Both players were strong in recognizing the ball and kicking it hard, but the Bonn robot won most fights for the ball and scored goal by goal. After 7:0 at half-timethe match ended with a 11:1 win for the NimbRo. The victorious NimbRo-OP2 robot also received the RoboboCup Design Award sponsored by the Japanese company Flower Robotics to promote the development of robots in research and teaching.
The Bonn TeenSize robots won the final of their class with a 2:0 victory over HuroEvolutionTN from Taiwan after dominating the game thanks to clear advantages.
Technical competitions
In the technical competitions the robots had to solve four tasks: kicking a rolling ball into the goal, kicking the ball over an obstacle, jumping up, and maintaining the balance when walking after a thrust.
New this year was a "drop-in" tournament, which was carried out in the TeenSize class. With 21 points the Bonn team won this partial competition.
The head of the team and of the Autonomous Intelligent Systems Group, Prof. Dr. Sven Behnke, said after the double victory: "This outstanding success is the joint success of our great team, which prepared the robots for the tournament."
Parallel to the RoboCup, the Amazon Robotics Challenge took place, in which the Bonn team took part for the second time. A total of 16 teams of international top universities and research institutes were selected by Amazon for the Challenge. In this application-oriented competition, manipulation tasks from the logistics sector were to be solved. The Bonners came up with a newly developed robotic system, which can handle objects from transport containers and a storage system with two manipulator arms and place them in the storage system or in cardboard boxes. The objects are captured with a high-resolution camera and a 3D sensor and are detected using methods of deep learning.
The manipulator arms are equipped with a bendable suction paddle and a further movable finger in order to be able to grip flexibly. The challenge consisted of two partial competitions and the final. In the pick competition, where the robotic system had to retrieve requested objects from the storage system and put them in cardboard boxes, the Bonn team achieved the second highest score of 245 and was only close to the team of TU Nanyang from Singapore, which scored 257 points. In the final, 16 objects had to be removed from a transport crate and stored, and then 10 objects were removed from the storage system and placed in cardboard boxes. Here, NimbRo also scored a second place with 235 points, behind the Australian team ACRV with 272 points. The Bonn robot had already picked up the last object missing for victory, but then put it back into the storage system and not as intended in the cardboard box because of a failed weight check. For the two second places the Bonn team will receive a prize money of 50,000 US dollars.
More information:
http://www.robocup2017.org/eng
https://www.amazonrobotics.com/#/roboticschallenge
Images:
http://www.ais.uni-bonn.de/nimbro/Humanoid
http://www.ais.uni-bonn.de/nimbro/Picking
Contact for the media:
Prof. Dr. Sven Behnke
Tel: ++49 228 73 4422
Mobil: ++49 176 240 64862
E-Mail: behnke@cs.uni-bonn.de
