SNU College of Engineering (Dean Kookheon Char) announced last 7^th that team TidyBoy, consisting of students from SNU, Korea University (KU), Pusan National University (PNU), and Hanyang University (HYU), has won the second prize at the RoboCup@Home 2019 Sydney’s domestic standard platform league. The team is also a joint research team for AI robotics under the Ministry of Science and ICT and contains members from the SNU Center for Artificial Intelligence, which is led by Professor Byoung-Tak Zhang of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
 
Founded in 1997, RoboCup is the largest international AI robotics competition. This year, around 3500 participants from over 40 countries competed in various leagues from robotic soccer, personal domestic applications, industrial automation, to disaster relief. Team TidyBoy participated in the Domestic Standard Platform League (DSPL) of the RoboCup@Home which aims to develop service and assistive robot technology for home environment setting that can read its surrounding and interact orally with human.
 
Team TidyBoy’s robot demonstrated sophisticated object recognition abilities, robotic arm control, and mobility, being able to open and close cupboards and bring objects to the user on the user’s oral command. The team’s robot succeeded in accomplishing difficult tasks that other teams withdrew from or failed at and received enthusiastic applaud from the audience.
 
Professor Seungjoon Yi from PNU, who was the team’s mentor during the competition, stated, “I am truly glad that our Korean team won the second prize among other strong teams from Oxford University, University Texas at Austin, and the engineering school of Kyushu University that ranked first for three consecutive years.”
 
Meanwhile, Chung-Yeon Lee (Department of Computer Science and Engineering) from SNU Center for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), who has guided the team to receiving this award, previously won the RoboCup in 2017.