A research team led by Prof. Byoung-Tak Zhang won the 2017 international RoboCup.

-Artificial intelligence robot AUPAIR, got the highest scores in home robot division … won the first place in the competition


▲ 2017 international RoboCup winner, a team led by Prof. Byoung-Tak Zhang
 

Seoul National University College of Engineering (Dean Kunwoo Lee) announced that a research team led by Prof. Byoung-Tak Zhang of School of Computer Science & Engineering won the 2017 International RoboCup competition held at Nagoya International Exhibition Center in Japan on July 30.

The team’s AI robot, AUPAIR, won the highest scores in all eight task assignments of social home robot division (RoboCup@HomeSSPL league), which performs service tasks in a daily environment such as home.

In the social home division, robots compete in the home environment and they should recognize human, objects, environment and understand human language to perform autonomous tasks. This competition is an important milestone for general robots to evolve into household robots.

For example, in the virtual cocktail party enviornment, robots need to take an order of a drink from a table when customers call for a robot and then goes to the bar to order a drink and deliver it to the table again. If the drink that the customer ordered was sold out, robots should be able to handle this kind of exceptions by retaking another orders.

In particular, AUPAIR was applauded in the tour guide scenario by talking with the audience in the open environment of the fairground. An international judge said, "I doubted whether the robots would be able to carry out the various high-missions that were introduced in the competition for the first time, and SNU's team succeeded in establishing a new international standard for the RoboCup.”

The team is consisted of Prof. Zhang and 9 graduate students, Bumjin Lee (team leader), Jinyoung Choi (technical leader), Kyunghwa park, Chungyeon Lee, Dasom Baek, Patrick Yimas, Cheolho Han, Dongsik Han, Sungjoon Choi)
On the first and second day of the competition, they moved up to the semifinal by winning finding human division, cocktail party division and home errands division. The final mission was a talent show, AUPAIR robot won the mission by a big margin for University of Technology Sydney thanks to the deep-learning based visual communication talent.

Meanwhile, the International RoboCup held every year since the first RoboCup competition, RoboCup Soccer. This is the prestigious international competition for autonomous mobile robot and it was held in Nagoya, Japan for four days from July 27 to 30.

This year, for the first time in the home robot sector, the human intelligence social home robot game that adopted the humanoid robot Pepper (manufactured by Softbank) as the platform was added to the main competition. Seven teams from seven countries around the world made them into the RoboCup finals.
 

▲ 2017 international RoboCup winner, a team led by Prof. Byoung-Tak Zhang