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Scientific competitions are important in robotics because they foster knowledge exchange and allow teams to test their research in unstandardized scenarios and compare result. In the field of service robotics its role becomes crucial. Competitions like RoboCup@Home bring robots to people, a fundamental step to integrate them into society.In this paper we summarize and discuss the differences between the achievements claimed by teams in their team description papers, and the results observed during the competition 1 from a qualitative perspective.We conclude with a set of important challenges to be conquered first in order to take robots to people's homes. We believe that competitions are also an excellent opportunity to collect data of direct and unbiased interactions for further research.

We present a simple, yet effective and flexible method for action recognition supporting multiple sensor modalities. Multivariate signal sequences are encoded in an image and are then classified using a recently proposed Effi-cientNet CNN architecture. Our focus was to find an approach that generalizes well across different sensor modalities without specific adaptions while still achieving good results. We apply our method to 4 action recognition datasets containing skeleton sequences, inertial and motion capturing measurements as well as Wi-Fi fingerprints that range up to 120 action classes. Our method defines the current best CNN-based approach on the NTU RGB+D 120 dataset, lifts the state of the art on the ARIL Wi-Fi dataset by +6.78%, improves the UTD-MHAD inertial baseline by +14.43%, the UTD-MHAD skeleton baseline by +1.13% and achieves 96.11% on the Simitate motion capturing data (80/20 split). We further demonstrate experiments on both, modality fusion on a signal level and signal reduction to prevent the representation from overloading.

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Gesture recognition opens up new ways for humans to intuitively interact with machines. Especially for service robots, gestures can be a valuable addition to the means of communication to, for example, draw the robot's attention to someone or something. Extracting a gesture from video data and classifying it is a challenging task and a variety of approaches have been proposed throughout the years. This paper presents a method for gesture recognition in RGB videos using OpenPose to extract the pose of a person and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in conjunction with One-Nearest-Neighbor (1NN) for time-series classification. The main features of this approach are the independence of any specific hardware and high flexibility, because new gestures can be added to the classifier by adding only a few examples of it. We utilize the robustness of the Deep Learning-based OpenPose framework while avoiding the data-intensive task of training a neural network ourselves. We demonstrate the classification performance of our method using a public dataset.