THWS team "SWOT" wins RoboCup world cup in Eindhoven
Runner-up world champions become the world champions: The "SWOT"-team of the Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt (THWS) has won the title at this year's RoboCup@Work world championship in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The team of the Center for Robotics (CERI) in Schweinfurt beat seven other teams and won the one-week competition at a clear lead. Three other teams from Germany participated. There were also teams from the Netherlands, Singapore, Greece, and Australia.
The "SWOT"-team has worked towards this success for five years now and has also already won the title of vice world champion, and the German championship twice. "This continuity is not a given," emphasises Professor Dr. Tobias Kaupp, who is in charge of the THWS Center for Robotics and who supervises the team. This competition offered bachelor's, master's, and doctoral students the chance to gain a lot of experience. However, this also entailed fluctuation that had to be balanced out by permanently employed lab engineers. "This year it went down to the wire as the first four teams showed similar competences throughout the week," Professor Dr. Kaupp says. "Watching was great fun because the participants of the league have come a long way!"
Topics focused around challenges to the industry
The RoboCup championship was created in 1996 with the aim to develop a humanoid robot team by 2050 that could win against the current soccer world champions. Since then, the RoboCup has diversified and now offers competitions in various leagues: The @Work League focuses on challenges in a so-called smart factory, in which robots must autonomously recognise, handle, and transport workpieces. As robot-assisted logistics and assembling are of great interest for German companies, the German higher education teams dominate this RoboCup league.
This year, the "SWOT"-team brought a new language feature to the competition. Their mobile robot platform can communicate via speech output what the robots perceives of the environment and what step will be executed next – which facilitates the work for the team and raises the audience's understanding. "SWOT" scored nearly 7,470 points, the runner-up team from Magdeburg was over 1,000 points behind. Yet, after the first of the six runs, victory had not at all looked likely: "Through a concatenation of two technical issues, we could not score any points for our first run – shortly before and after, however, it worked perfectly!" team captain Lucas Reinhart describes the stressful starting situation. "But then we went from the very bottom to the very top."
The team from Schweinfurt also won the "Coworker Assembly Test" for the cooperation between human and robot. For this, the team had developed gesture recognition to communicate with the robot. "Compared to last year, we have implemented a few improvements and new features," explains lab engineer Martin Löser. "We had hoped for chances to win but that we would actually succeed is so awesome!" Team "SWOT" has big plans for the future: "We intend to defend our title in Brazil next year," Professor Dr. Kaupp announces. "In order to do so financially and logistically, we will acquire one or two sponsors from the industry."
Background
German higher education teams are not only active in the RoboCup@Work League but also in the leagues for the automation of rescue operations, the application of service robots at home, and in different robot soccer leagues. Now, there are also student competitions for different age groups. For further information, please see https://major.robocup.de/
Contact:
Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt
Prof. Dr. Tobias Kaupp
Head of the the Center for Robotics (CERI)
Ignaz-Schön-Str. 11
97421 Schweinfurt
Press contact:
Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt
Angela Kreipl
Münzstr. 12
97070 Würzburg
+49 931 3511-8354
