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UT Austin Villa

RoboCup@Home DSPL Team


Professors Peter Stone, Andrea Thomaz, Scott Niekum, Luis Sentis, Raymond J. Mooney, and Justin W. Hart

The University of Texas at Austin


Approach

Our team fuses several laboratories from across the University of Texas at Austin and brings considerable expertise in robotics. Prof. Peter Stone, the founder of the UT Austin Villa RoboCup soccer team, leads the Building-Wide Intelligence Project which explores the obstacles to deploying autonomous service robots in a building environment. Prof. Andrea Thomaz, an expert in interactive robotics, leads a laboratory focused on human-robot interaction for social robots. Prof. Scott Niekum, the leader of UT's Personal Robotics Robotics Laboratory, researches learning from demonstration and safety for robot learning. Prof. Luis Sentis, an expert in robotic control, leads a laboratory focused on enhancing control for robots operating near humans. Prof. Raymond Mooney leads a group with broad interests within natural-language processing and natural-language learning.

Our development efforts are situated within our ongoing Building-Wide Intelligence project, which has the long-term objective of enabling a team of robots to achieve long-term autonomy within the rich, socially interactive environment of the UT Austin Computer Science building. The HSR robot will thus be embedded within a multi-robot system of heterogeneous robots while its novel software is under development at UT Austin.

In the '17-'18 season, we established a permanent testing arena simulating the domestic environment.

UT Austin Villa@Home Arena
UT Austin Villa@Home Arena

Over the past two seasons, we have constructed a framework intended to act as a comprehensive domestic service robot system, spanning multiple robot platforms. As instantiated in RoboCup@Home, our goal is to develop a single system which competes in every round, rather than a suite of software tailored to each round. In the realization of this goal, we have ported our RoboCup@Home code back to the Building-Wide Intelligence (BWI) infrastructure. As instatiated in BWI, the goal of this project is to deploy a service robot in our computer science department which responds to the day-to-day needs of the building's occupants, and is considered a part of the fabric of our department.

Scientific Achievements

The team leaders' past scientific achievements are chronicled on their respective websites:

Relevant publications


Photos/videos

Posing in the arena, RoboCup 2018 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Working on robot setup, RoboCup 2018 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Excited to watch our GPSR run, RoboCup 2018 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Receiving our third place trophy at RoboCup 2017 in Nagoya, Japan
Our third place trophy from RoboCup 2017
The Nagoya crew at RoboCup 2017

Software

During our participation in the RoboCup@Home SPL, we are committed to continuing our strong tradition of contributing open source code to the community.


Team Roster

Additionally, we will be recruiting students from the Freshman Research Initiative Autonomous Intelligent Robotics stream.


Previous participation in RoboCup

Segway at Robocup @Home 2007
Segway in Robocup @Home 2007 Final
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