ToBI - Team of Bielefeld Enhancing the Robot Capabilities of the Social Standard Platform Pepper

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the joint effort of the Team of Bielefeld (ToBI) winning the RoboCup@Home Social Standard Platform League (@Home SSPL) at the world cup in Montreal 2018. The @Home competition consists of benchmarking tests that cover multiple skills required for service robotics and human-robot interaction in domestic environments. The @Home SSPL is one of three different sub leagues – two of those focus on specific standard platforms, the third allows open platforms. In the SSPL the standard platform is the Pepper robot by Softbank. In this contribution, we present our approach and the design decisions for enhancing the standard platform Pepper for the competition. This includes the development and testing environment, the preparation process, the integrated software system as well as the components providing enhanced skills for the robot. We further describe the ideas and techniques used to extend the human-robot interaction by a mixed-reality interface and a first approach to bimanual grasping. Both was presented in the final demonstration of the competition.