RoboCup@Home: Analysis and results of evolving competitions for domestic and service robots

Abstract

Please cite this article in press as: L. Iocchi et al., ROBOCUP@HOME: Analysis and results of evolving competitions for domestic and service robots, Artificial Intelligence (2015), http://dx. AbstractScientific competitions are becoming more common in many research areas of artificial intelligence and robotics, since they provide a shared testbed for comparing different solutions and enable the exchange of research results. Moreover, they are interesting for general audiences and industries. Currently, many major research areas in artificial intelligence and robotics are organizing multiple-year competitions that are typically associated with scientific conferences.One important aspect of such competitions is that they are organized for many years. This introduces a temporal evolution that is interesting to analyze. However, the problem of evaluating a competition over many years remains unaddressed. We believe that this issue is critical to properly fuel changes over the years and measure the results of these decisions. Therefore, this article focuses on the analysis and the results of evolving competitions.In this article, we present the RoboCup@Home competition, which is the largest worldwide competition for domestic service robots, and evaluate its progress over the past seven years. We show how the definition of a proper scoring system allows for desired functionalities to be related to tasks and how the resulting analysis fuels subsequent changes to achieve general and robust solutions implemented by the teams. Our results show not only the steadily increasing complexity of the tasks that RoboCup@Home robots can solve but also the increased performance for all of the functionalities addressed in the competition.We believe that the methodology used in RoboCup@Home for evaluating competition advances and for stimulating changes can be applied and extended to other robotic competitions as well as to multi-year research projects involving Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.

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“…Since 2009, we compete with our cognitive service robots in the RoboCup@ Home league (Wisspeintner et al, 2009;Iocchi et al, 2015), which is the top venue for benchmarking domestic service robots. In this annual international competition, robots have to demonstrate human-robot interaction and mobile manipulation in an apartment-like and in other domestic environments.…”

Understanding Natural Language Instructions for Fetching Daily Objects Using GAN-Based Multimodal Target–Source Classification

“…We used the same parameter settings and structures given in Table II. Except for the input dimensions and x rel , the characteristics of the networks are shared between Experiment (1) and (2).…”

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“…In this schema, a robot can't advance to the next step unless (successfully) completing the current one. This allowed to delimit the degree of uncertainty, making possible to estimate performance by measuring the contribution of each ability to each reached goal; as performed by Iocchi et al in their analysis in [15]. In addition, this schema considers increasing the difficulty every third year, fine-tuning only in between.…”