Instituição Proponente: IST
Unidade de Investigação Principal: ISR
LARSyS Plurianual Budget
PEst-OE/EEI/LA0009/2011

  • RoboCup2023

  • RoboCup2023 Team

  • euROBIN Hackaton

  • ERL Tournament ISRoboNet@Home Testbed

  • ERL @Barcelona

  • ERL Tournament ISRoboNet@Home Testbed

  • Testbed 2017

  • ERL Barcelona 9

  • RoboCup 2018

  • ERL @Barcelona

  • ERL Barcelona 3

  • ERL Barcelona 8

  • ERL Barcelona 1

  • ERL Tournament ISRoboNet@Home Testbed

  • ERL Tournament ISRoboNet@Home Testbed

  • ERL Tournament ISRoboNet@Home Testbed

SocRob@Home is an active team of SocRob, a long-term project at Institute for Systems and Robotics from Instituto Superior Técnico, which encompasses a broad range of efforts towards a team of robots to perform tasks, with a particular focus on the participation in scientific competitions.

This page tells the project history until 2024. For 2024 and later, check the new web page of the project.

Research focus

The Intelligent Robots and Systems research group of the Institute for Systems and Robotics coordinated a major EU funded project directly related to human-robot interactions and social behaviours. The MOnarCH project aimed to provide a set of autonomous robots with the capabilities of performing tasks to entertain kids with health issues (more specifically, cancer) from Instituto Português de Oncologia Francisco Gentil in Lisbon (IPO).

After that, from 2013 until 2015, the EU funded project RoCKIn, in collaboration with five other partners, encompassed a set of competitions related to domestic and work environments, which were organized to test new benchmark methods for evaluating challenging aspects of state-of-the-art robots

The legacy of these two projects, plus the challenge to find a domestic solution for robotics convinced us to gather and form a unique team, highly motivated and ready for the challenges to come!

  • Perception and sensor fusion: how to extract meaningful information from one or more sensors, and fuse together information from several sources, taking into account their associated uncertainty. We take a probabilistic approach to quantitatively representing uncertainty, as well as performing inference, on the solid theoretical framework provided by Bayesian statistics;
  • Decision making under uncertainty: how perception and action affect the real world is inherently uncertain so it’s important to take a decision-theoretic approach on the maximization of the expected utility;
  • Human-robot interaction: once robots operate in human-inhabited environments they need to interact with humans. In this context, we pursue multiple communication modalities, including speech, web-based remote interface, and onboard touch interface;
  • Manipulation and grasping: the problem of robots being capable of grasping and manipulating real-world objects, which raises interest in topics from finger design to motion planning.

Team

The team is comprised of students and researchers related to robotics. From Post-Docs to MSc students on a voluntary basis, all of them contribute hand-on to the project. Check former members here

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Pedro Lima

Full Professor, Project Coordinator
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Rodrigo Serra

Research Engineer, Team Leader
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Rui Bettencourt

PhD Student
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Catarina Caramalho

BSc Student
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Diogo Silva

MSc Student
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Miguel Nabais

MSc Student
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Clara Pais

MSc Student
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Robin Steiger

MSc Student (U. Freiburg and IST)
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Pedro Sarnadas

MSc Student
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Thijs Verbroekken

MSc Student
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Afonso Certo

MSc Student
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João Pinheiro

BSc Student
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Gabriel Nunes

Lab Technician
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António Morais

BSc Student
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Patrícia Torres

BSc Student
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João Carranca

BSc Student
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Tiago Teixeira

BSc Student
Past team members
Rodrigo Ventura (Faculty)

Carlos Azevedo (Post-doc)
Aamir Ahmad (Post-doc)
João Messias (Post-doc)
Meysam Basiri (Post-doc)
Pedro Miraldo (Post-doc)
Tiago Veiga (Post-doc)

Guilherme Lawless (PhD Student, Team Leader)
Oscar Lima (PhD Student, Team leader)
Enrico Piazza (PhD Student)
Francisco Lera (PhD Student)
Tiago Dias (PhD Student)

Filipe Jesus (Research Engineer)
João Mendes (Research Engineer)
Jhielson Pimentel (Researcher Engineer)
Mithun Kinarullathil (Researcher Engineer)

Ana Rita Carvalho (MSc Student)
André Farinha (MSc student)
André Mateus (MSc Student)
Carolina Loureiro (MSc Student)
Diogo Maximino (MSc Student)
Diogo Pires (MSc Student)
Emanuel Fernandes (MSc Student)
Inês Alexandre (MSc Student)
João Barroca (MSc Student)
João Cartucho (MSc Student)
João Cerejeira (MSc Student)
João Garcia (MSc Student)
João Gonçalves (MSc Student)
João O’Neill (MSc student)
João Pereira (MSc Student)
José Iglesias (MSc Student)
Luis Luz (MSc Student)
Raphael Colcombet (MSc Student)
Maria Braga (MSc Student)
Miguel Silva (MSc Student)

Nuno Mendes (MSc Student)
Pedro Resende (MSc Student)
Pedro Santos (MSc Student)
Ricardo Simas (MSc Student)
Rute Luz (MSc Student)
Soraia Ferreira (MSc Student)
Tomás Ribeiro (MSc Student)
Verónica Spelbrink (MSc Student)
Vicente Pinto (MSc Student)

Diogo Serra (Lab Technician)
Dmytro Kotenko (Technician)

Tiago Cardoso (Lab Technician)

Robots

Previous Robot: ISR-CoBot

ISR-CoBot was an experimental platform for research in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). A service robot for office environments, it was designed to perform tasks for users. The research was targeted towards a robust platform capable of navigating in crowded environments, to create robots that were aware of their own limitations and are thus capable to autonomously asking humans for help.

The platform resulted from an ongoing collaboration with the CoBot project at Carnegie Mellon University, based on a customized Nomadic Scout differential drive platform. The equipment included a touchscreen on a laptop for HRI and computing, an Hokuyo UTM-30LX laser range finder (range 30m), a Kinect RGB-D camera, and an IP PTZ camera.

 

The TIAGo Steel robot is equipped with a differential-drive base. It has a front laser range-finder and rear sonars which are used for mapping, navigation, and obstacle avoidance. It has a 7 degree of freedom arm with a parallel gripper as end-effector and a lifting torso that allows it to reach higher. In addition it has a speaker and stereo microphone useful for human-robot interaction and an RGB-D camera positioned in the head for object detection and localization, people tracking, obstacle perception and visual servoing.

TIAGo is continuously developed and tested at the ISRoboNet@Home Testbed.

Previous Robot: MBot

The MBot is composed of two main parts: body and head. The head can pan and has LED backlight to express emotions through a drawn mouth, eyes and checks. The body has all of the CPU devices (two motherboards with i7 processors), a touchscreen and all of the navigation mechanics, based on a Four-Wheel Omnidirectional Mecanum drive.

Regarding additional sensors and actuators needed specifically for @Home competitions, a Cyton 1500 Robai Arm with 7 DoF was attached to the left side of the body for manipulation capabilities and a microphone was placed on the top of the head for voice recognition.

The MBot is continuously developed and tested at the ISRoboNet@Home Testbed.

Event Participations

2023

2021

 

2019

 

2018

 

2017

2016

2015

  • 19-23 Nov 2015 — RoCKin Competition 2015 (Lisbon, Portugal), a very successful presence, winning two out of three Task Benchmarks and winning ex-aequo (with the Home@Koblenz team) the RoCKIn@Home Challenge!

 

2014

  • 24-30 Nov 2014 – ROCKIn Toulouse, France

Media

In the SocRob@Home Youtube channel, you’ll find many videos of demos, participation in  International and National competitions, or even relevant events such as the Mbot interacting with the President of Portugal.

You can also see many photos that are taken during competitions and other demos, like the latest album from RoboCup 2018.

Follow the team on Facebook and Instagram. You can also keep track of the team’s blog, to be a part of the latest developments and achievements.

Publications

 

  • Meysam Basiri, Joao Pereira, Rui Bettencourt, Enrico Piazza, E. Fernandes, Carlos Azevedo, Pedro Lima, “Functionalities, Benchmarking System and Performance Evaluation for a Domestic Service Robot: People Perception, People Following, and Pick and Placing”, Applied Sciences. 2022; 12(10):4819, 2022. URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/app12104819
  • Tomás Ribeiro, Oscar Lima, Michael Cashmore, Andrea Micheli, Rodrigo Ventura, “Olisipo: A probabilistic approach to the adaptable execution of deterministic temporal plans”, Proc. of TIME 2021 – 28th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning, University of Klagenfurt, Austria, Vol. 206 pg1-15, 2021. URL: https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.TIME.2021.15
  • Carlos Azevedo, António Matos, Pedro Lima, Jose Avendaño, “Petri Net Toolbox for Multi-Robot Planning under Uncertainty”, Applied Sciences. 2021; 11(24):12087, 2021. URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/app112412087
  • Rui Bettencourt, Pedro Lima, “Multimodal Navigation for Autonomous Service Robots”, Proc. of ICARSC 2021 – IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions, pp. 25-30, 2021. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICARSC52212.2021.9429771
  • Pedro Lima, Carlos Azevedo, Emilia Brzozowska, João Cartucho, Tiago Dias, Joao Goncalves, Mithun Kinarullathil, Guilherme Lawless, Oscar Lima, Rute Luz, Pedro Miraldo, Enrico Piazza, Miguel Silva, Tiago Veiga, Rodrigo Ventura, SocRob@Home: Integrating AI Components in a Domestic Robot System, KI – Künstliche Intelligenz (2019), 2019. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-019-00618-w
  • João Gonçalves, Pedro Lima, Grasp Planning with Incomplete Knowledge About the Object to be Grasped, Proc. of 19th IEEE Int. Conf. on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC 2019), 2019.
  • Emilia Brzozowska, Oscar Lima, Rodrigo Ventura, A generic optimization based cartesian controller for robotic mobile manipulation, Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Montreal, Canada, 2019
  • Tiago Veiga, Miguel Silva, Rodrigo Ventura, Pedro Lima, An Hierarchical Approach to Active Semantic Mapping Using Probabilistic Logic and Information Reward POMDP, Proc. of ICAPS 2019 – 29th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, Berkeley, USA, 2019
  • Meysam Basiri, Enrico Piazza, M. Matteucci, Pedro Lima, “Benchmarking Functionalities of Domestic Service Robots Through Scientific Competitions”, KI – Künstliche Intelligenz (2019), 2019
  • Rute Luz, Guilherme Lawless, Oscar Lima, Rodrigo Ventura. Small Obstacle Detection and Avoidance using a depth camera: a Case Study in RoboCup@Home, Workshop on Robots for Assisted Living of IEEE/RSJ International Conference On Intelligent Robots And Systems (IROS), 2018, Madrid, Spain.
  • Carlos Azevedo, Pedro Lima, “A GSPN Software Framework to Model and Analyze Robot Tasks”, Proc. of 19th IEEE Int. Conf. on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC 2019), 2019
  • Mithun Kinarullathil, Pedro H. Martins, Carlos Azevedo, Oscar Lima, Guilherme Lawless, Pedro U. Lima, Luís Custódio, Rodrigo Ventura. From User Spoken Commands to Robot Task Plans: a Case Study in RoboCup@Home. Workshop on Language and Robotics of IEEE/RSJ International Conference On Intelligent Robots And Systems (IROS), 2018, Madrid, Spain
  • Oscar Lima, Rodrigo Ventura, and Iman Awaad. Integrating classical planning and real robots in industrial and service robotics domains. In Workshop on Planning and Robotics (PlanRob), International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), Netherlands, 2018. URL: http://users2.isr.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/~yoda/papers/Lima18.pdf
  • João Cartucho, Rodrigo Ventura, and Manuela Veloso. Robust object recognition through symbiotic deep learning in mobile robots. In IEEE/RSJ International Conference On Intelligent Robots And Systems (IROS), 2018, Madrid, Spain.
  • Pedro Miraldo, Francisco Eiras, Srikumar Ramalingam. Analytical Modeling of Vanishing Points and Curves in Catadioptric Cameras. In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, Salt Lake City, USA. URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.09460
  • Pedro Miraldo, Tiago Dias, Srikumar Ramalingam. A Minimal Closed-Form Solution for Multi-Perspective Pose Estimation using Points and Lines. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, Munich, Germany. URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.09970
  • Oscar Lima, Rodrigo Ventura, A case study on automatic parameter optimization of a mobile robot localization algorithm, Proc. of ICARSC 2017 – IEEE 17th International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions, Coimbra, Portugal. http://users2.isr.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/~yoda/papers/Lima17.pdf
  • José Iglésias, Pedro Miraldo, Rodrigo Ventura, Towards an Omnidirectional Catadioptric RGB-D Camera, Proc. of IROS 2016 – IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Daejeon, Korea. http://users2.isr.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/~yoda/papers/Iglesias16.pdf
  • Rodrigo Ventura, Meysam Basiri, André Mateus, J. Garcia, Pedro Miraldo, P. Santos, Pedro Lima, “A Domestic Assistive Robot Developed Through Robotic Competitions”, IJCAI 2016 Workshop on Autonomous Mobile Service Robots, New York, USA, 2016

Contacts

Pedro Lima

pedro.lima (at) tecnico.ulisboa.pt

+351 21 841 8289

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Pedro Lima

Full Professor, Project Coordinator

Are you looking for an amazing experience with real robots in a team environment, while contributing actively for state-of-art research and gaining personal experience that will prove fruitful to your academic and professional future?

If you’re interested in joining SocRob, please send an email to socrob-info (at) isr.ist.utl.pt, or directly contact the responsible, stating who you are, your motivations, your academic background and how you would contribute to this project. Also, check here for more information about our work and some requisites.