SocRob@Home, a team comprised of students from Instituto Superior Técnico and researchers from the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa), achieved an impressive third place at RoboCup 2024, one of the world’s largest robotics and artificial intelligence championship.

RoboCup is considered the premier event to compete in robotics, featuring 17 competitions across 5 categories, from soccer to care robots. The SocRob@Home team has participated in this competition for several years, having achieved second place in 2023.

This year, entering the finals in second place, the team faced fierce competition from “Tidy Boys” of Pusan National University and Seoul National University, South Korea—last year’s champions—and Nimbro@Home from the University of Bonn, Germany, known for their consistent victories in international competitions, despite finishing fourth last year.

Pedro Lima, Técnico Professor, President of ISR-Lisboa and the team’s coordinator commented that this result follows a consistent series of good presences in RoboCup@Home in the last few years: 4th place in 2018 and 2020, and 2nd place in 2023, while progressing in scores and quality of technical achievements. “As always, this is the result of the excellent team of students (PhD, MSc, Sc), research engineers and lan technicians working as a team, under pressing deadlines and  requiring much creativity and problem solving skills”.

SocRob@Home ranked in the top 3 out of 17 teams from prominent universities such as Tsinghua University (China), EPFL (Switzerland), National Autonomous University of Mexico, Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico), Lincoln University (UK), and esteemed institutions like SoftBank Robotics and CATIE (French Tech Center).