Double First Overall, AUTCup 2018
We just got back from our first appearance at the Amirkabir University International Robotics Competition (AUTCup) in Tehran, Iran. We took first overall in both divisions (kid and teen size) of the Hurocup league. Pictured above-left is our Post-Doctoral Fellow Meng Cheng Lau (Center) with the two Computer Science Undergraduate Students who went to the competition, Mario Mendez Diaz (Left) and Jin (Dylan) Park (Right).
There were more than a hundred participants across all the leagues in the competition, from eight countries: Iran, Canada, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, Mexico, Brazil, and Germany. The many leagues included everything from wheeled robots to drones, but our entries involved the FIRA HuroCup - this is a multi-sport event for humanoid robot athletes, in which the same robot must be used in all events. To win the overall competition a team must perform well across a range of events, each of which challenge different aspects of control, perception, and planning. We will be participating in the main FIRA HuroCup event in Taiwan later this summer, so this was a useful test of our work so far at a local level.
We competed with both large (adult size) and small (kid size) robots. Each of these leagues had mainly similar events but with a few differences. The overall results for our team (the SnoBots) were:
Kid Size:
- Archery - First Place
- Archery with Moving Target - Second Place (New Event)
- Sprint - First Place
- Long Jump - First Place
- Weight Lifting - First Place
- All-round - First Place (Second Place: Iran, Third Place: Brazil)
Adult Size:
- Archery - First Place
- Archery with Moving Target - First Place (New Event)
- Downhill Skiing - Third Place (New Event)
- Sprint - First Place
- Long Jump - First Place
- All-round - First Place (Second Place Iran, Third Place: Korea/Taiwan)
While even with significant support from Amirkabir we could only send three representatives, these entries represent a major period of work in our laboratory by many people. In addition to Professor John Anderson and the members of the lab who went to the competition, this includes Amir Hosseinmemar, Ph.D. student, Chi Fung (Andy) Lun, 4th year CS Undergraduate, Kurt Palo, 2nd year CS Undergraduate, and Ziang Wang, ECE M.Sc. Student. Congratulations everyone on this great result. Now we move to work on RoboCup, in Montreal, and the main FIRA HuroCup, in Taiwan, both later this summer.
AUTCup 2018, Tehran
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.
1st Prize, Humanoid Application Challenge at IROS-17
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!
Two Gold, One Silver, One 4th overall, FIRA HuroCup 2017
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.
