The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Service and Industrial Robots (Season 2016/17), during the euRobotics Awards Ceremony held on 23 March, at the National Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh. Rainer Bischoff (KUKA Roboter GmbH) and Pedro Lima, (Instituto Superior Técnico – University of Lisboa) handed the Awards.
Homer@UniKoblenz, the team from University of Koblenz (Germany), won four out of the five possible Awards for the ERL Service Robots Season 2016/17, for the tasks: "Getting to Know My Home”, "Visit My Home”, "General Purpose Service Robot” and the functionality "Object Perception”. Lisa, the winning robot of homer@UniKoblenz, is a combination of out-of-the box hardware and sensors, able to perform a wide range of tasks such as safe and autonomous navigation, grasping objects, recognising faces, following people, understanding spoken commands and even displaying seven different facial expressions.
SPQReL, the team from the University of Rome “La Sapienza" (Italy) won the fifth ERL Service Robots award for the functionality "Speech Recognition”.
The winners of the ERL Industrial Robots Season 2016/17 were the autonOHM team, from TH Nürnberg (Germany) for the task "Fill a Box with Parts for Manual Assembly”, and b-it-bots team, from Bonn Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences (Germany) for "Navigation Functionality”.
A total of 31 teams from around the world have participated in this first season of ERL; 23 teams in ERL Service Robots and 8 teams in ERL Industrial Robots. Five local tournaments and two major tournaments have taken place during ERL Season 2016/17 at ISRoboNet@Home Test Bed (Lisboa, Portugal), ECHORD++’s RIF @Peccioli (Peccioli, Italy), Leon@Home Test Bed (Leon, Spain), b-it-bots@Work Test Bed (Sankt Augustin, Germany) and RoboCup 2016.
The scorings and standings of all the teams are available on ERL Service and ERL Industrial web pages.
ERL Service and ERL Industrial Awards were sponsored by Texas Instruments University Program that provided tournaments’ winners with a set of SensorTags.
Team SPQReL receives the ERL certificate and the Texas Instruments kit. Copyright: Visual Outcasts
Winners of ERL Service Robots and ERL Industrial Robots season 2016-17. Copyright: Visual Outcasts
Francesco Ferro, from PAL Robotics, Platinum Sponsor of the ERL Service Robots new Season 2017/18, explained “PAL Robotics is proud to show its support to ERL Service Robots competition by becoming a Platinum sponsor as announced during the European Robotics Forum's award ceremony. PAL Robotics will offer on a very affordable rental scheme limited units of TIAGo robots for different teams to use. In order to help promoting the competition, PAL Robotics will host a local tournament for ERL Service Robots in Barcelona, Spain, during the European Robotics Week in November 2017”.
PAL Robotics with the winners of ERL Service and ERL Industrial Robots. Copyright: Visual Outcasts
The ERL Emergency Robots Awards will be handed during the Major Tournament to be held on 15-23 September 2017 in Piombino, Italy.
John Potter, from IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (OES), Platinum Sponsor of the ERL Emergency Robots Tournament in Piombino, explained: “OES is proud to be the Platinum Sponsor of the European Robotics League Emergency Robots event, contributing to our vision of promoting the involvement of students and young professionals in the exciting and expanding field of oceanic engineering. The OES sees this direct involvement as a way to build value, providing an avenue for participants to learn, grow, publish, make career connections and, in the future, to take on significant roles in OES, building up to the creation of standards developed by, and enjoying the consensus of, the AUV community”.
Watch the ERL Emergency 2017 promo video, premiered at the euRobotics Awards Ceremony, in Edinburgh.
ERL History
The ERL is the natural evolution of a series of highly successful previous competitions that were established via FP7 funded projects: RoCKIn, euRathlon and EuRoC. All three projects aimed to foster scientific progress and innovation in cognitive systems and robotics through the design and implementation of new competitions.
The European Robotics League is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement n° 688441.
Watch the European Robotics League promo video
About euRobotics and SPARC
euRobotics is a non-profit organisation based in Brussels with the objective to make robotics beneficial for Europe's economy and society. With more than 250 member organisations, euRobotics also provides the European Robotics Community with a legal entity to engage in a public/private partnership with the European Commission, named SPARC.
SPARC, the public-private partnership (PPP) between the European Commission and euRobotics, is a European initiative to maintain and extend Europe’s leadership in civilian robotics. Its aim is to strategically position European robotics in the world thereby securing major benefits for the European economy and the society at large.
SPARC is the largest research and innovation programme in civilian robotics in the world, with 700 million euro in funding from the European Commission between 2014 to 2020, which is tripled by European industry to yield a total investment of 2.1 billion euro. SPARC will stimulate an ever more vibrant and effective robotics community that collaborates in the successful development of technical transfer and commercial exploitation.