Disappointing Finals due to Hardware Failure

TIA-didn’t-Go – sorry for that joke – at least for our navigation when trying to follow a straight line on this last day. Just like we did after the evening events, but with the unpleasant side effect that he didn’t recover in the morning of the finals day.

As promising as our tests were looking out to be the day before (with Pick and Pack successfully finding and gripping items from shelves, Items being socially acceptably delivered without hesitation and doors being opened and closed left and right), we sadly couldn’t carry that momentum over to the scored final run. When we woke up, we had to realize that our ever existing issue of missing traction came to a critical point, where our navigation failed because of the massive drifting when the robot was trying to move. In a last ditch effort to save Erik’s Final run (he was the first Episode of the day with SAID) we tried to clean the tires with alcohol to regain some softness and therefore grip on the slippery floor. But without much success as it has shown. leaving us in second place in SAID.

After the SAID run, we had some hope left in TTD as the other teams hadn’t been able to pass through the door until that point, and Lukas was still able to unlock the handle with the robot being in its non-moving state. But it was too little too late, he managed to equal Team Cranfield in score and win over them by timing decision, but the Team from Bonn then managed to pass through the door. This meant that, because only the final run was counted, they won the episode by score.

Similar things unfolded in SPAP, as the score would have been at least equal if TIAGo could have driven to search for the items, but because we could only grip while standing still, Cranfield ran away with the episode with 1 point in front of us because of the searching action.

All in all, the competition was a valuable experience for us as a team, and we met a lot of friendly faces along the way. Sometimes luck just isn’t on your side, but that can happen to anyone in a comp!

Better luck next time, Team Homer

A promising start at ERL Smart City (Milton Keynes)

We are excited to share our current status (written on Wednesday night already, published Thursday morning), challenges and achievements with you from our first day at the ERL Smart City event 2023, which is taking place in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, from 18 to 21 September.

The European Robotics League is a major event for robotics enthusiasts and professionals, where teams from different countries across Europe compete in various tasks and scenarios that simulate real-world scenarios. The ERL’s “Smart City” category, focuses on domestic and social robots that can assist humans in everyday life. There are 5 so-called Episodes to solve, each consisting of specific tasks which have to be solved autonomously by the robots.

TIAGo reaching out for ordered items on the storage shelfs during Shopping Pick and Pack.
TIAGo reaching out for ordered items on the storage shelfs during Shopping Pick and Pack.

We participate in 3 of these 5 Episodes: “Through the Door”, “Socially Acceptable Item Delivery” and “Shopping Pick and Pack”. We have done pretty well so far in all of them, placing us in a strong position for the rest of the on-going competition.

In the first episode “Through the Door” the robot has to open, drive through, and close a door. This may seem simple for us humans, but it requires a lot of coordination and precision from the robot’s sensors, actuators, and software – without having much of any sensation of pressure in its finger tips. The robot has to detect the door handle, grasp it, turn it, pull or push the door, drive through the doorway, and close the door behind itself. The robot has to do this without damaging the door or itself, and within a limited time. Our robot performed flawlessly in this episode and was the only one that has currently succeeded in opening the door.

In the second episode “Socially Acceptable Item Delivery”, Erik successfully made Tiago communicate with a human via speech and gesture recognition, identified and grabbed an item and delivered it to the goal location, only hindered by an interruption caused by a typo in the code… Trying again on the next day.

As for “Shopping Pick and Pack”, an episode where you have to grab items from a storage shelf and place them safely at a given location afterwards, our team got suprised by a last minute rule change, forcing us to rewrite and restructure the prepared placing procedure. This caused major time loss as we had to use practice runs for debugging, but at the end of Comp-Day we again were able to perform our first fetching of an object from a shelf and placing it in a shopping basket.

We will work hard tonight to push for maximum points in the finals tomorrow, but since they only consist of a single run per Episode, we need every bit of luck we can get!

Cheers, Team Homer

Socially Acceptable Team Recovery.
Socially Acceptable Team Recovery.

Why we won't be at Robocup 2023

Hey there, robo- and tech enthusiasts!

It’s time for a little update from the “Robbie 40” student team, currently involved as team homer@UniKoblenz. So unfortunately, we won’t be able to participate in the Robocup 2023 in Bordeaux, France. 😢 The reason why we can’t make it to Robocup this year is that one of our robots had a major malfunction during large parts of our development and preparation period. The arm of our robot was defective and thus caused some trouble for our team. Thankfully, TIAGo’s creators from PAL Robotics helped us with finding and finally solving our issues by repairing the arm – but in the end, there simply wasn’t enough time left. We couldn’t finish our preparations for the challenges and we had to withdraw from the competition.

arm no workies
arm no workies

But fear not, dear friends! We aren’t letting this minor detour dampen our spirits. We are already working on improving our robots and routines in order to get ready for a possible next challenge. In fact, we have some exciting news to share with you. We are planning to participate in the ERL Smart City competition in Milton Keynes (GB) in September! 🎉 With that bit of extra time on our hands, we should be able to put TIAGo’s arm issues to rest, be well prepared and come back stronger.

The ERL is a European Robotics League that organizes tournaments in different domains: service robots, industrial robots, and emergency robots. As you might expect us to, we are going to compete in the service robot category, where our robots will have to perform tasks such as delivering orders in a coffee shop, picking objects for packing or wrestle with a robot’s arch-enemy: doors designed for humans.

Although we won’t make it this year, we still of course wish the best of luck to all the competitors at Bordeaux this year!

Cheers, team homer

Team Homer competition recap ERL 2022!

Team Homer again live at competition(s)!

Facing many uncertainties caused by COVID-19, we haven’t been not sure whether we would be able to compete at any competition, only if it is close enough or if we could show what we had developed and learned at any other occasion. Initially, we had planned to participate in the RoboCup German Open at Magdeburg, Germany, 2022, if it would take place again – it hasn’t. We had already qualified and registered for RoboCup World Championship in Bangkok, Thailand, but with the surge in new COVID-19 variants, we have been skeptical if it would be wise and save to travel this far (not taking the costs into account yet). We decided to not take any risks here and canceled our registration, hoping that next year, things get better still. Finally, we decided to participate in the current ERL 2022 season at the local tournament in Oldenburg, Germany, in the beginning of May as it hasn’t been that far away and even in the case of infection, re-planning and improvising would work. We even had one false-positive alarm shortly before we started our journey… Lucky us that this hasn’t happened before trying to enter any airplane or something like this. We were able to take a few core elements from our RoboCup preparations, but there was still a lot of work to do as we had little more than a month for this. We decided to try to complete all the tasks specified in the ERL rulebook: Keeping Grandma Annie comfortable, visiting my home, getting to know my home, and welcoming visitors. Despite the shortage of time and other restrictions, we’ve been still pleased with how things have gone back again in physical presence.

We managed to win two out of the three Task Benchmarks in which we took part in (“Welcoming Visitors” and “Catering for Annie Grannie’s Comfort”)! Working and competition atmosphere were great with our competitors SCC (Serious Cybernetics Cooperation) from the Hochschule Ravensburg-Weingarten and our hosts of at OFFIS in Oldenburg! We really enjoyed it and hope to see you all again soon. 🙂

All in one we were very happy to finally see Lisa and TIAGo competing live once again. All this was exciting because only a part of the team was allowed to be on site. The members who have stayed home remotely helped with things as labeling data for the training neural networks for object recognition.

Over the past seven months, the current team has gained a lot of experience. From fields as object recognition and manipulation to robot-human interaction, we have been able to gain a wide range of practical knowledge that will help us in the future.

We are very grateful to have been a part of it.

As usual, stay safe and healthy and see you soon!

Best regards Team Homer