Tomorrow, Our post-doctoral fellow Meng Cheng Lau and two Computer Science Undergraduate students, Jin Park and Mario Mendez Diaz, are heading with our robots to Amirkabir University in Tehran for the humanoid robot competitions at the 2018 AUTCup.
We have been collaborating Amirkabir University since 2013, and this will be the first time we have put a full team into their competition. Look for results here in the coming days!
We will be also partnering with Amirkabir as well as National Taiwan Normal University for a humanoid team at RoboCup 2018 in Montreal in June.
Our lab has just won first place in the 2017 Humanoid Application Challenge at this year's IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Systems (IROS), IEEE's flagship robotics conference. The Humanoid Application Challenge is intended to be more open-ended than most other robotics competitions, in that entries are judged on dimensions of effectiveness and innovation in a given theme rather than stating a precisely defined goal such as winning a soccer competition. This perspective encourages creative entries that cross boundaries and bring together work from many areas of artificial intelligence that are important to intelligent humanoid robots, including vision, speech understanding, coordination, reasoning, machine learning, and human-robot interaction.
This year's theme was once again Robot Magic, and our entry used strong combinations of vision, machine learning, speech understanding, gesture recognition, and human-robot interaction to perform a magic act that involved several tricks and interaction with the audience. We had two undergraduate students that went to IROS in Vancouver to demonstrate this work: Kyle Morris, an undergraduate student in Computer Science (who also did our second prize-winning Robot Magic entry last year), and Vlad Samonin, a Computer Engineering undergraduate who has been volunteering in our lab. They did a tremendous amount of work, which was supervised by Drs. Meng Cheng Lau (our Post-Doctoral Fellow) and John Anderson.
As the first place winner, the work is being demonstrated today live at the main IROS conference, and video and media of this should be available soon. Video of all the entries being judged in the competition is available here. We were also honoured to be asked to demonstrate this work at the University of Manitoba's Homecoming this year.
This is the fifth Humanoid Application Challenge and we are proud to have won first or second/finalist prize in this competition every year it has been run. Some of our previous first-prize work was the skating and skiing work you can read about in previous stories on the lab website. While we are exceptionally proud of all of our competition wins, the Humanoid Application Challenge is unique in that its awards are robotics equipment, which directly supports further research work in the lab. The first prize awarded this year is a DARwIn OP3 Humanoid Robot (valued at around $13,000), which will join our collection of DARwIns that we use for the small-size humanoid work in the lab. This is an incredibly useful addition, and we thank Robotis for sponsoring the prize, and IROS for travel funding.
Congratulations to everyone involved and we are looking forward to having you back, Kyle and Vlad!
The FIRA HuroCup robotics competition was held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan from August 23-27, 2017. HuroCup is a multi-sport event for humanoid robots, with a broad range of events including an obstacle course, weightlifting, basketball free throws, a marathon, and a sprint, and this year we competed with both small (kid) and adult size humanoids. HuroCup was especially challenging this year, with many strong Taiwanese teams compared to previous years: our overall performance was better than previous years in both leagues, but this was not enough to take home an overall award (though we came in 4th in Adult Size overall). We were very pleased with performances across events though, setting a new record in the teen size long jump, and taking gold in small size archery and silver in large size archery, a new event this year.
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- Adult Size
- Amir Hossenmemar, CS Ph.D Student
- Chi Fung (Andy) Lun, 4th year CS Undergraduate and Faculty of Science research student
- Emanuel Wiens, 3rd year CS Undergraduate
- Ziang (Daniel) Wang, ECE M.Sc. Student
- Kid Size
- Zheng Yu (Harry) Gu, 4th year CS Undergraduate
- Kurt Palo, 2nd year CS Undergraduate
- Olayinka Basheer Adelakun, 3rd year CS Undergraduate
- Beom-Jin (Dylan) Park, 3rd year CS Undergraduate
- Daryl Fung, 2nd year CS Undergraduate
- Qiuting Gong, MITACS Globalink student
Andy, Daniel, Kurt and Harry traveled to Taiwan along with MC, who deserves a huge thanks not just for leading the teams on the ground but for being head referee for HuroCup at the same time and delivering an invited talk on work in our lab. Many thanks to all our student volunteers, without whom we would not have a team, and to the Department of Computer Science, the Faculty of Science, and the University of Manitoba who all help with travel costs. A larger gallery of pictures and video should be available shortly.
The Robocup-2017 robotics competitions were held in Nagoya, Japan, July 27-31, and we are very happy with our results there. AUTMan, Our joint teen-size team with Amirkabir University of Technology came in third in the world in the autonomous teen-size robot soccer competition. We also came in third in the set of technical challenges that accompany the soccer competition (push recovery, high jump, high kicks, and goal kicks). Working with larger size robots is a definite challenge over the smaller leagues, and we also had some significant equipment damage that had to be recovered from, burning out 11 servos on the first day due to a hardware malfunction. This was a significant challenge to return from, but the team did very well in spite of an even tougher slate of competitors this year. As usual this work takes a significant number of people, not all of whom can attend the competition because of limited budgets. This year our post-doctoral fellow Meng Cheng Lau, science undergraduate Chi Fung (Andy) Lun (who is a Faculty of Science research student in our lab this summer), and Engineering undergraduate Ziang (Daneil) Wang travelled to Nagoya along with Jacky Baltes, while John Anderson and Amir Hossenmemar remained back at the lab. Many thanks to our teammates at Amirkabir for their work as well!
Next up is the HuroCup multi-sport humanoid robot event in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, August 23-27. Meng Cheng, Andy, and Daniel will be remaining in Asia and working on our team as guests at the National Taiwan Normal University until the HuroCup starts, while further work continues in our lab here and further students join them later in August.
Many thanks also to the Faculty of Science, the Department of Computer Science, and the University of Manitoba, all of whom help with student travel expenses.
A larger gallery of pictures is available here.
