RoCKIn@Home: Domestic Robots Challenge

Abstract

Service robots performing complex tasks involving people in houses or public environments are becoming more and more common, and there is a huge interest from both the research and the industrial point of view. The RoCKIn@Home challenge has been designed to compare and evaluate different approaches and solutions to tasks related to the development of domestic and service robots. RoCKIn@Home competitions have been designed and executed according to the benchmarking methodology developed during the project and received very positive feedbacks from the participating teams. Tasks and functionality benchmarks are explained in detail. Keywords: robot competitions, domestic robots, speech understanding, semantic mapping, person and object detection and recognition 1. RoCKIn@Home motivations and rules With the goal of fostering scientific progress and innovation in cognitive systems and robot-ics, and to increase the public awareness of the current state-of-the-art of robotics in Europe, the RoCKIn project [1] developed RoCKIn@Home, a competition for domestic service robots. The competition was designed around challenges that are based on easy-to-communicate and convincing user stories, which catch the interest of both the general public and the scientific community. In particular, the latter aims at solving open scientific challenges and to thoroughly assess, compare and evaluate the developed approaches with competing ones. The RoCKIn@Home competition hence aimed at bolstering research in service robotics for home applications, and to raise future capabilities of robot systems to meet societal challenges, like healthy ageing and longer independent living. To allow this to happen, competitions