- RoboCup-athome - lists.robocup.org

Wifi guidelines in Nagoya
by Komei Sugiura 12 Jul '17

12 Jul '17

Dear all, Wifi guidelines are updated. https://robocup2017.org/file/RoboCup2017_WirelessGuideline_0712.pdf Regards, Komei

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[jobs] Robotics PhD positions in Groningen, for candidates outside the Netherlands
by Wolf, B.J. 10 Jul '17

10 Jul '17

Dear list members, Several new fully funded PhD positions available in the Data Science & Systems Complexity programme at the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Groningen. The projects entitled `The value of data' and `Home robotics' will be supervised by Bart Verheij and myself, together with Ernst Wit and Ming Cao, respectively. If you are interested in artificial intelligence, logic, probability theory, argumentation, data analysis or robotics, don't hesitate to apply! If you have questions, do get in touch with: l.c.verbrugge(a)rug.nl b.verheij(a)rug.nl Information about the two projects: The value of data: http://www.rug.nl/research/fse/themes/dssc/cofund/ training/#project-4-the-value-of-data Home robotics: http://www.rug.nl/research/fse/themes/dssc/cofund/ training/#project-13-home-robotics There is also a project co-supervised by Marieke van Vugt: http://www.rug.nl/research/fse/themes/dssc/cofund/training/#project-7- understanding-the-complex-system-of-the-brain …and a project co-supervised by Marco Wiering and Lambert Schomaker: http://www.rug.nl/research/fse/themes/dssc/cofund/training/#project-2- dimensionality-reduction-for-huge-classification-problems Information about application: http://www.rug.nl/research/fse/themes/dssc/cofund/application/ Please note the following: - In your motivation letter, you should apply for a specific project or projects. - There are restrictions: you should not have resided or carried out your main activity in The Netherlands for more than 12 months in the three years before July 15, 2017 (the deadline for application). Best wishes, Ben Wolf team leader Team Borg, University of Groningen

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FYI: Number of registered teams and participants
by Komei Sugiura 04 Jul '17

04 Jul '17

Dear @Home teams/EC/TC/OC, The followings are the numbers of registered @Home teams/participants as of June 30. OPL 15 teams, 166 participants DSPL 10 teams, 76 participants SSPL 7 teams, 46 participants I'm looking forward to seeing you in Nagoya! Regards, Komei -- ***************************************************************** Komei Sugiura, Ph.D. Senior Researcher, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology 3-5 Hikaridai, Seika, Soraku, Kyoto 619-0289, Japan Email: komei.sugiura(a)nict.go.jp URL: http://komeisugiura.jp/index_en.html *****************************************************************

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IEEEì RO_MAN Workshop - HRI for Service Robots in RoboCup@Home
by Luca Iocchi 03 Jul '17

03 Jul '17

Dear RoboCup@Home teams, please consider participation to this workshop that has been organized by the IEEE Technical Committee on RoboCup. Best regards, Luca. ==================================================================================================== HRI for Service Robots in RoboCup@Home Workshop of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (IEEE RO-MAN 2017) Lisbon, Portugal, September 1st, 2017 (half day workshop). http://www.diag.uniroma1.it/~labrococo/hri-for-service-robots/ The aim of this workshop (which is organized by the IEEE TC on RoboCup) is to present the challenges and technical developments addressed by RoboCup@Home to the research community in Human-Robot Interaction and to acquire feedback on the technical challenges in HRI, to be pursued through robotic competitions for benchmarking the performances of Service Robots. The workshop is especially timely, as RoboCup@Home has just launched the standard platform league by selecting two platforms, namely the Softbank Pepper and the HR Toyota Robots. The adoption of standard platforms can be beneficial in several respects. On one hand it will make the competition framework more accessible to the researchers in HRI as the standard platform allows to focus on the HRI development, by exploiting exhaustive solutions for the basic functions. On the other hand, the use of a standard platform allows for a more specialized setting for benchmarking and comparison of the results of experiments aiming at assessing manifold design choices in HRI. In this respect, the workshop will also provide a forum to discuss the approach to benchmarking in other competitions, in particular the European Robotics League on Service Robotics (ESR-RL). The technical programme of the workshop will include: -- a session of technical contributions; -- a panel discussion focused on the HRI challenges that are currently developed in the competition and can be added to the competition. We solicite contributions to the panel discussion in the form of a position paper of 2 pages to be mailed at capobianco(a)dis.uniroma1.it by July 20^th . The earlier, the better. We will send acceptance notifications and make the final programme available shortly afterwords. Confirmed speakers: Manuela Veloso (CMU, Pittsburg), Pedro Lima (IST, Lisbon), Francesco Ferro (Pal Robotics), Amit Kumar Pandey (Softbank Robotics),Winners of RoboCup 2017, Participants of ERL event at IEEE Ro-Man. Keywords: Gesture, Sound, Non-verbal communication, Facial expressions, Joint Actions, Behaviour Recognition, Proxemics, Spoken Language Interaction, Human Robot Dialogues, Social navigation, Social rules, HRI Testing, Performance Evaluation, Benchmarking. Organizing Committee; Daniele Nardi (Sapienza Univ. Roma), Minoru Asada ( Osaka University, Japan), Daniel Lee (Univ. Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA), Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA), Pedro Lima (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal)

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Two bachelor theses Social Standard Platform League
by Visser, Arnoud 03 Jul '17

03 Jul '17

Dear all, this weekend two of our students finished their theses inspired by the challenges of the Social Standard Platform League. Because 2017 is the first year that the Social Standard Platform League is organized, the number of publications is still limited, so I thought that this work could be of interest to the community: * Jonathan Gerbscheid, People detection on the Pepper robot using Convolutional Neural Networks and 3D blob detection<https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/a.visser/research/athome/JonathanGerbscheidBachel…>, Bachelor thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, July 2017. * Tirza Soute, Discovering Available Drinks through Natural, Robot-Led, Human-Robot Interaction between a Waiter and a Bartender<https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/a.visser/research/athome/TirzaSouteBachelorThesis…>, Bachelor thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, July 2017. Regards, Arnoud Visser on behalf of the UvA@Home team https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/a.visser/research/athome/

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[@Home2017-OS Award] Call for submissions
by Mauricio Matamoros 28 Jun '17

28 Jun '17

*Call for submissions* RoboCup @Home Open-Source Award 2017 With the aim to foster the research in the field of service and assistive robotics, as well as the cooperation among teams not only within @Home, but also RoboCup-wide, this year RoboCup@Home will award the best contribution to the community by means of open source software solutions. Deadline (Extended) ==================== The deadline for short paper submission is next Friday 14th of July, 2017. *Application* Qualified candidates must belong to an accepted participant team in the 2017 RoboCup @Home international competition. Interested candidates must send their application by email to the Technical Committee (tc(a)robocupathome.org) at least one month before the competition. Please fill in the following information: Team Name: League: Country: Software Responsible (person in charge): Software License (GNU, BSD, Apache, etc): Link to the Software website: Software Description Paper (SDP) attached to the email. *Remark: *The Software website is where the open source contribution is documented and can be downloaded. It must also contain links to the repository, the Software Description Paper, as well as examples, tutorials, and dependencies. The e-mail subject should be: [@Home2017-OS Award] (YourTeamName) ***** Deadline: Friday, July 14, 2017 23:59 GMT ***** *Software Description Paper* The SDP is a 4-pages long technical report, detailing scientific and technical information of the presented software and its underlying algorithms and principles, including a brief explanation of the approach, comparison with State-of-the-Art techniques, statement of the used metrics and software design patterns, and the name of the teams and other collaborators that are also using the software being described. The SDP must follow the same format used for the team RoboCup @Home Team Description Paper (Springer LNAI format <http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0> up to 4 pages including references and without altering margins and spacing). *Candidate Software * The software must be easy to read, properly documented, follow standard design patterns, be actively maintained, and meet IEEE software engineering metrics of scalability, portability, maintainability, fault tolerance, and robustness. In addition, the open sourced software must be made available as a framework-independent standalone library so it can be reused with any software architecture. *Evaluation Criteria* The Technical Committee (TC) members from the RoboCup@Home league nominate a set of candidates for the award. The Executive Committee (EC) elects the winner. A EC/TC member whose team is among the nominees is not allowed to vote. With kind regards, and looking forward to see your team in Nagoya, The 2017 RoboCup@Home Organizing and Technical Committees

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External Computing Devices
by Anas Abou Allaban 20 Jun '17

20 Jun '17

Hi All, I have been requested to ask this question by the TC. We are currently using two external computing devices for the HSR: 1. Google Cloud SDK 2. A custom workstation with Ubuntu 14.04 My questions are: - Are these valid external computing devices that can be used in robocup? (Apparently yes) - What are some experiences with internet/cloud based services? Are they reliable or should we try to keep things as local as possible? Thanks! Anas

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[jobs] Postdoctoral Position: NICT Japan
by Komei Sugiura 08 Jun '17

08 Jun '17

Advanced Speech Technology Lab. at NICT, Japan has an open *Postdoctoral* position. ## ABOUT NICT-UCRI (NICT Universal Communication Research Institute) NICT is a Japanese national research institute that focuses on information and communications technology. NICT employs 900 researchers/engineers/staffs, and has ten research centers. NICT-UCRI is one of them, and is situated 30km south of Kyoto, a historical city of Japan. ## ABOUT THE POSITION - The position is offered at a one-year basis, and is renewable until March 2021. - The salary will depend on qualifications and experience. - The successful candidate will have access to our software engines and large-scale corpora for spoken dialogue studies. ## HOW TO APPLY http://www.nict.go.jp/en/general_affairs/employment/index-e-top2016-10.html Closing date: July 4, 2017. ## POSITION (1) Reference: 2017R-30 * Research Topic: "Spoken Language Understanding and Motion Generation Using Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Information for Domestic Service Robots" * Abstract: The objective of this project is to investigate spoken language understanding methods using linguistic and non-linguistic information for domestic service robots. As a successful candidate, you will focus on applying machine learning methods to train probabilistic models with large-scale linguistic and non-linguistic data obtained from physical/cyber spaces, as well as on language understanding, dialogue, and motion generation that are dependent on the situations and users. * Minimum Qualifications - Ph.D. in computer science, informatics, robotics, or a related field - Strong publication record in the fields related to robot learning, machine learning, spoken language processing, computer vision, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence - Good communication skills in spoken and written English * Preferred Qualifications - Extensive programming skills in Python/JavaScript/MATLAB/C++ - Independent and persistent personality, as well as a team player * Details http://www2.nict.go.jp/employment/tempstaffinfo/exr-e/H29/2017R-30.pdf -- ***************************************************************** Komei Sugiura, Ph.D. Senior Researcher, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology 3-5 Hikaridai, Seika, Soraku, Kyoto 619-0289, Japan Email: komei.sugiura(a)nict.go.jp URL: http://komeisugiura.jp/index_en.html *****************************************************************

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[meetings] IROS 2017 Workshop: Semantic Policy and Action Representations for Autonomous Robots (SPAR)
by Karinne Ramirez Amaro 06 Jun '17

06 Jun '17

********************************************************************************************** ****2nd Workshop on Semantic Policy and Action Representations for Autonomous Robots (SPAR)*** ********************************************************************************************** ----Call for Posters and Demonstrations--- We are calling for contributions to our IROS 2017 workshop. We would like to invite the attendees of this workshop to submit an extended abstract explaining their current work or developed systems in the areas of reasoning, perception, control, planning, and learning applied to robotic systems. This workshop is intended for roboticists interested in improving the reliability and autonomy of robots. We hope to bring together outstanding researchers and graduate students to discuss current trends, problems, and opportunities in semantic action (policy) representations, encouraging communication and common practices such as sharing datasets among scientists in this field. *** Important Dates ***: Paper submission deadline: 25th July 2017 Notification of acceptance: 15th August 2017 Camera ready submission: 1st September 2017 Workshop day: 24th September 2017 *** Call for contributions *** We encourage 1-2 pages extended abstract of relevant work that has been previously published, or is to be presented at the main conference. The accepted abstracts will be posted on the workshop website in a compiled yearbook and will not appear in the official IEEE proceedings. Furthermore, we particularly call for live demonstrations to be presented on the workshop day. We encourage researchers as well as companies (both hardware and software companies) to contribute to the workshop. The reviewing is single blind and will be carried out by the workshop chairs. Please submit your abstract to the workshop official email address <spar.workshop(a)gmail.com> before July 25, 2017. The accepted demonstrations can show their systems and its benefits to a broader audience. The accepted papers will have the opportunity to present their work/ideas in a poster session. Two selective submissions will give a 15 min talk at the workshop. Please indicate in your email if you want to present as a poster, oral, and/or live demonstration. Furthermore, a selective number of papers from the poster sessions will be invited to submit their novel work to the Special Issue we are proposing in the journal “Robotics and Autonomous Systems”. This special issue will cover the main topics of interest of this workshop. ***Workshop URL*** https://www.ics.ei.tum.de/workshop-iros-spar17/ Contact email: spar.workshop(a)gmail.com *** Workshop objectives *** The aim of this one-day workshop is two-fold. First, we intend to highlight to the robotics community the recent developments in semantic reasoning representations and semantic policy generation from low level (sensory signal) to high level (planning and execution). More importantly, we want to reconcile and integrate various bottom-up and top-down approaches for semantic action perception and executions in different domains. Second, we are aiming to compare various state-of-the-art approaches for generic action and reasoning representations in both computer vision and robotic communities, looking for a common ground to combine assumedly different approaches for autonomous capability and reliability. For this, we would like to propose and define different data sets that could be potentially used as benchmarks to compare the presented methods. We would like to take advantage of the recent efforts that some laboratories took by making their testing data sets publicly available. In addition, we would like to encourage this best practice to the participants of this workshop. This workshop will present the main benefits of this new emerging type of methods such as allowing robots to learn generalized semantic models for different domains. We will also like to discuss the next breakthrough topics in this area, e.g. the scalability of the learned models that can adapt to new scenarios/domains in a way that the robot can transfer all the acquired knowledge and experience from existing data to new domains with very little human intervention. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: *AI-Based Methods --Learning and adaptive systems & Probability and statistical methods --Action grammars/libraries & Spatiotemporal event encoding --Machine learning techniques for semantic representations *Reasoning Methods in Robotics and Automation --Signal to symbol transition (Symbol grounding) & Different levels of abstraction --Semantics of manipulation actions & Semantic policy representation --Context modeling methods *Human Behavior Recognition --Learning from demonstration & Object-action relations --Bottom-up and top-down perception *Task, Geometric, and Dynamic Level Plans and Policies --PDDL high-level planning & Task and motion planning methods *Human-Robot interaction --Prediction of human intentions & Linking linguistic and visual data *** Invited Speakers *** (in alphabetical order, all confirmed) 1) Yiannis Aloimonos University of Maryland, USA 2) Tamim Asfour Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 3) Heni Ben Amor Arizona State University, USA 4) Gordon Cheng Technische Universität München, Germany 5) Gregory D. Hager, Johns Hopkins University, USA 6) Tetsunari Inamura, National Institute of Informatics, Japan 7) Lydia E. Kavraki, Rice University, USA 8) Manuela M. Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University, USA *** Organizers *** Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Technical University of Munich, https://www.ics.ei.tum.de/people/ramirez Yezhou Yang, Arizona State University, USA, https://yezhouyang.engineering.asu.edu Neil T. Dantam, Rice University, http://www.neil.dantam.name Eren Erdal Aksoy, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, http://h2t.anthropomatik.kit.edu/english/21_947.php Gordon Cheng, Technical University of Munich, https://www.ics.ei.tum.de/en/people/cheng -- Dr.-Ing. Karinne Ramirez Amaro Institute for Cognitive Systems Technische Universitaet Muenchen Address: Karlstr. 45, 2.OG. 80333 Munich, Germany Room: 2008 Web page: http://web.ics.ei.tum.de/~karinne/Ramirez/index.html email: karinne.ramirez(a)tum.de Telephone: +49-89-289-26791

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One week more for deadline: ERL Service Robots - Call for Participation in Major Tournament in Lisbon, co-located with IEEE RO-MAN 2017
by Pedro U Lima 02 Jun '17

02 Jun '17

================================================ Call for Participation European Robotics League (ERL) Service Robots Major Tournament during RO-MAN 2017 28.08 - 31.08.2017 Institute for Systems and Robotics at Instituto Superior Técnico (ISR/IST), U. Lisbon Lisboa, Portugal Web: https://sites.google.com/site/erlsrroman2017/ ================================================ The European Robotics League is an innovative concept for robot competitions which stems from its predecessor, the RoCKIn@Home competition, and focuses on tasks that service robots execute in a real home environment. The ERL is composed of multiple "Local tournaments", held in different research labs across Europe, with certified test beds, and a few competitions as part of "Major tournaments" such as RoboCup. Teams participate in a minimum of two tournaments (Local and/or Major) per year and get scores based on their performances. Scores of the best two participations in tournaments for each team are added and teams are ranked based on their cumulative score. Prizes for the top teams are awarded during the next year’s European Robotics Forum (ERF). For more information, please visit https://eu-robotics.net/robotics_league/. We are pleased to announce the second Major Tournament on the ERL Service Robots (ERL-SR) challenge, to be held between 28-21 August 2017 at the Institute for Systems and Robotics of IST, University of Lisbon, Portugal, simultaneously with the IEEE RO-MAN 2017 Conference. Important dates: ########## 09 Jun 2017 - Deadline for application and request for travel support 16 Jun 2017 - Qualification announcement 28 Aug 2017 - Competition begins 31 Aug 2017 - Competition ends Rules: ###### The rules of the competition can be found in https://eu-robotics.net/robotics_league/upload/about/ERL_Service.compressed…. NOTE: the rules can still be updated in the upcoming weeks, so as to adapt the Task Benchmarks shared with RoboCup@Home. For the Local ERL-SR Tournaments, the following task and functionality benchmarks will be (tentatively) considered: • TBM1: Getting to Know My Home • TBM4: Visit My Home • TBM5 General Purpose Service Robot (shared with RoboCup@Home) • FBM1: Object Perception • FBM2: Navigation • FBM3: Speech Recognition Application: ####### Applicant teams must send an email to erl.service(a)robotics-league.eu expressing their intention to participate in the Tournament and providing the following information about the team: - Team name - Team Leader name - Total number of team members (including the team leader) - Affiliation - Contact information (e-mail and phone of team leader) - Website - Qualification material (see below). Qualification Material - applicants are required to submit (template and form can be downloaded from https://www.eu-robotics.net/robotics_league/erl-service/about/index.html): - Team Description Paper (max. 4 pages, LNCS [3]) explaining the team’s approach to the technical challenges - including: i) the list of TBMs and FBMs the team intends to participate in; ii) a brief description of the robot system software and hardware architectures, and iii) the relation with the team research - including a list of relevant publications - Video showing evidence of some performance in the tasks and/or functionalities selected by the team - Filled travel support request form requesting and justifying travel support, if needed Selection Criteria: ####### Teams will be selected for participation and travel support based on _ number of available slots for team participation in the tournament (5 / five, in this case); _ available funds for travel support (maximum of 2K€ per team per year); _ team research quality, as measured from the TDP and list of relevant publications; _ team financial needs (as declared by the team request for travel support). ================================================================================================

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