SciRoc Challenge Call for Participation closed – Who are the participating teams?

The call for participation to the world’s first smart city robot competition was officially closed on June 30th. 15 teams from 8 countries will be competing across 5 different robotic tasks (or episodes).

Episode 3 – Coffee shop order delivery
This episode, sponsored by Costa Coffee, will see robot waiters attempting to manage order deliveries in the competition arena. This task will involve technologies and expertise at the intersection of Robot navigation and Robot perception.

Episode 4 – Taking the elevator
Forget the infamous lift conversations and elevator pitches. In this episode, robots will lead the conversation (Human Robot Interaction – HRI).

Episode 7 –  Shopping pick & pack
Picking the correct objects and preparing a shopping parcel is a challenge for robots. This episode, sponsored by Ocado Technology, will see the recent advancements in mobile manipulation at work.

Episode 10 – Open the door
A task as simple as opening a door could be taken as granted by us humans, but reproducing the same set of actions on a robot requires orchestrating several fine coordination mechanisms and complex manipulation technologies.

Episode 12 – Fast delivery of emergency pills
Drones could aid the just-in-time delivery of medications to patients. The drone cage set up as part of the Sciroc challenge will host robots competing on aerial delivery of medical parcels.

Here is the final list of participating teams:

• Robotics Lab UC3M                                Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain)
  Episode 3, 4
• SocRob@Home                                       Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal)
  Episode 3
• Gentlebots                                               Rey Juan Carlos University (Spain)
  Episode 3, 4
• The Matrix                                               Robotek (Belarus)
  Episode 3
• UWE Aero                                                University of the West of England (UK)
  Episode 12
• eNTiTy – Everbots                                   NTT Inc. (Spain)
  Episode 3, 4, 10
• Team ORIon                                            University of Oxford (UK)
  Episode 3, 4, 7, 10
• Leeds Autonomous Service Robots     University of Leeds (UK)
  Episode 3, 4
• b-it-bots                                                 Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (Germany)
  Episode 3, 4, 7, 10
• HEARTS                                                  Bristol Robotics Laboratory (UK)
  Episode 3, 4,7
• CATIE Robotics                                      CATIE (France)
  Episode 3, 4, 7, 10
• Homer                                                    University of Koblenz-Landau (Germany)
  Episode 3, 4, 7, 10, 12
• A3T                                                         University of Twente (Netherlands)
  Episode 12
• TeamBathDrones research                   University of Bath (UK)
  Episode 12
• SPQR Aerial                                           La Sapienza (Italy)
  Episode 12

As part of the 5 challenges the robots are set, they will need to access data from Milton Keynes’ smart city portal in order to carry out the competition tasks.  The teams will compete throughout the week as they seek to get on the rostrum for the awards ceremony being held on Saturday 21st September.

Milton Keynes’ has one of Europe’s largest shopping centre and the purpose of having the competition in the middle of it, is to create a massive public engagement event.  500,000 shoppers are expected to come through the centre during the week and will have a chance to learn about what robots can do and how they can interact with smart cities. Alongside the competition will be public engagement activities, a technical symposium and a chaired debate on ‘Artificial Intelligence – Fact vs Fiction’ taking questions from the general public.

A detailed schedule for the week of 16 to 22nd September will be published over the summer.