From February 5 to 8, the third local tournament of the European Robotics League (ERL) Consumer Service Robots – 2018/19 season, took place at the ISRoboNet@Home Test Bed, an infrastructure at ISR|Lisboa, built to benchmark domestic robot functionalities and tasks.

ERL Consumer is one of the four challenges of the European Robotics League, within the frame of SciRoc H2020 project,  which is composed of multiple “Local Tournaments” held in different research labs across Europe and a few “Major Tournaments”. Teams participate in a minimum of two Tournaments (Local and/or Major) per year and scores of the two best participations for each team are added, ranking teams based on their cumulative score.

Coordinated by Meysam Basiri and with the support of Rui Bettencourt and João Pereira, this local tournament counted on the participation of two great teams: our own SocRob@Home and Homer@UniKoblenz from University of Koblenz, Germany. The two teams might have been competing against each other but the general intention was also to information and knowledge, towards a common goal. As the Homer team shared “For example, the advanced data augmentation of the SocRob team might be very helpful. In return, we would like to share our gesture recognition method with them.”

For the home team the participation did not just lead to a display of relevant improvements and some “personal” victories, they also won two of the task and functionality benchmarks: TBM2 “Welcoming Visitors” and TBM4 “Visiting my Home”. Also during the competition, a group of secondary students from Agrupamento de Escolas Eduardo Gageiro got to visit the Testbed and watch the Mbot in action, as well as ask the researchers questions about their work.

Prizes for the top teams will be awarded in March, during the European Robotics Forum (ERF) in Bucharest, Romania. ISR|Lisboa is an active participant in the organization of these competitions, contributing not only with the ISRoboNet@Home Test Bed but also by leading the Work Package on ERL Consumer Competitions and being involved in the Smart City Major Tournaments, within the H2020 SciRoc project.