From July 11 to 18, 2022, six uniandinos students from Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Systems and Computer Engineering and an instructor from Electrical and Electronic Engineering that integrate the SinfonIA research initiative were in Bangkok, Thailand, representing Colombia in the RoboCup 2022, the international scientific initiative that has managed to gather more than 3,000 participants from 45 countries to promote the latest advances in the area of intelligent robotics, Artificial Intelligence and automation.
This international competition was born in 1997 with the idea of using soccer as a means to achieve innovative solutions to social and industrial problems, through teams of autonomous robots that compete with behaviors and strategies. Since then, representatives of educational and research institutions participate in different categories or "leagues" and meet year after year in a different host country to generate cooperation networks and knowledge exchange in these fields.
The league in which SinfonIA participated was the RoboCup@Home, which seeks to develop technologies relevant to service or assistive robotics. This league has become the largest annual international competition for autonomous service robots and is designed for teams to navigate a set of comparative tests to evaluate the capabilities and performance of support robots in the "home". Competing robots must achieve advanced functions such as human-robot interaction and cooperation, navigation and mapping in dynamic environments, machine vision and object recognition in natural light conditions, object manipulation, adaptive behaviors, behavior integration, environmental intelligence, and system standardization and integration.
The SinfonIA Uniandes team competed with 20 teams from different countries such as Sweden, France, China, South Korea and the Netherlands and won second place in the STANDARD Social Platform subcategory. Its semi-humanoid robot Pepper, called 'Nova', solved complex tasks of a waiter such as taking an order, serving guests, carrying drinks from one place to another and taking out the garbage. Through the Robot Operating System (ROS) programming system, the SinfonIA team was able to demonstrate Nova's skills in autonomous navigation, human-robot interaction, computer vision, object manipulation and natural language processing.
For Carlos Torres, a sixth semester student of Mechanical Engineering and member of SinfonIA, "participating in this competition meant contributing to Colombian social robotics to improve the quality of life of people. In addition, it is the opportunity to apply all the concepts learned and have an unforgettable experience on the other side of the world".
Congratulations to the uniandino team and thank you for leaving the name of Uniandes and Colombia high in the middle of this competition!
Members of the team competing in the RoboCup2022:
- Juan José García Cárdenas: Professor Instructor of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and leader of the SinfonIA Uniandes initiative.
- Susana Marcela Chávez Leyton: Master's student of electronic and computer engineering.
- Santiago Rodríguez Ávila: Electronics engineering student.
- David Santiago Vargas Prada: Electronics engineering student.
- Carlos Felipe Torres Usma: Mechanical engineering student.
- Luccas Rojas: Mechanical engineering and systems engineering student.
- David Santiago Ortiz Almanza: Student of electronic engineering and systems engineering.
Watch the video with which the uniandinos managed to qualify for the competition:
