Pembroke students in Team ORIon participate in RoboCup 2019

Congratulations to Team ORIon in their recent participation in the annual RoboCup Competition 2019!

RoboCup is a major international robotics competition that takes place every year. This year’s competition was held in Sydney, Australia, and saw teams compete in four categories; Soccer (a robot’s ability to play soccer), Industrial (the ability to assist in industrial logistics), Rescue (the ability to carry out rescue missions) and @Home (a robot’s ability to assist with life in domestic environments).

The Oxford Robotics Institute’s Team ORIon, applied for the @Home category and faced a competitive multimedia selection process. The team consists of nine undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral students, with four of the team members representing Pembroke.

Pembroke team members include Matt Budd (MEng Engineering Science, 2016), Mia Mijovic (MEng Engineering Science, 2018), Charlie Street (DPhil Engineering Science, 2018) and Marc Rigter (DPhil Engineering Science, 2018) were all supervised and supported by Pembroke Fellow in Engineering science, Professor Nick Hawes and Pembroke senior Associate Bruno Lacerda.

Participants in the RoboCup@Home League compete with their Robots performing operations that assist human life in domestic environments such as a living room or a kitchen, using an everyday robot utilization scenario. Important technologies in the competition include robot arm control and manipulation, such as for opening and closing doors and holding objects. Importance is also placed on the robot’s ability to track a human being, and the establishment of naturalistic robot-human communication. Additionally, RoboCup@Home tests the use of all kinds of sensors for voice interaction and image recognition technologies.

Pembroke first year and team member, Mia, commented:

‘The innovation of our ORIon team is the combination of each team member's expertise to work towards to our long term goal of general purpose service robot. This is the first year that the Oxford Robotics Institute team has competed in it. Our team consists of undergraduate students, graduate students and postdocs. 9 people went to Sydney to represent the team of which 4 are Pembroke students. After a great few days, we finished with 600 points and narrowly missed qualifying for the semi-finals by a single spot. We ended up being sixth out of 10 teams.’

The team have kindly been financially supported throughout the competition by the Department of Engineering Science.

To keep up to date with the team, follow them via Twitter @TeamORIon7