- Justina won second place in the RoboCup world competition, in the Home League category, only surpassed by the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
- In the same contest, but in the Standard Platform League category, the robot “Takeshi”, with university software, got the fourth place
We share from UNAM:
Justina, the UNAM service android, endorsed its global importance by obtaining second place in the international RoboCup 2019 competition, in the Home League category, held in Sydney, Australia. It was only surpassed by the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
In little more than a decade, Justina he has competed on all fronts in the robotics field, and on almost all continents: in Asia he visited China, Japan, Singapore and Turkey; in Europe he was in Holland, Germany, Austria and France; in America he went to Brazil; and now to Oceania.
It was created in 2006, in the Biorobotics Laboratory of the Faculty of Engineering (FI), headed by Jesus Savage, where undergraduate and graduate students participate.
“We have the level to compete for the first places, and it is the product of the perseverance and rigor of working until weekends and holidays. The key is to summon new students who are instructed by those with more experience, in this way it does not start from scratch and is endorsed as a long-term project, ”said Savage, a researcher at the FI.
The competition
In the contest, held recently, the “Pumas” team from the Biorobotics Laboratory was nurtured by new members, highlighted Hugo Enrique Estrada León, from Postgraduate in Computer Science and Engineering from this university.
"In my opinion Justina had better performance than the winning robot, it was noticeable in the manipulation of the objects and in their navigation, which confirms that we are not that far from Asian or European teams, although the challenge is to refine the mental part ”, he indicated.
Reynaldo Martell, team leader, added that Justina and “Pumas” have gained respect and are now perceived as true rivals.
On this occasion, said Savage, some rules were modified, a situation that was sorted out on the fly. “Within these new rules, the robot could call for help. For example, in one of the tests where an object had to be taken and put elsewhere, vision systems sometimes fail, and the robot may ask the person to bring the object closer. We wanted to do the entire routine without human help and it reduced our score ”, he explained.
Justina I had to open a cabinet where there were dishes, utensils and fruits, find in which panel the objects were and go to a table; the students trained her well, but her limb caught with a tab from the repository, the robot started pulling and broke her arm. Even so, they managed to repair it and get a good score. It was only surpassed by the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
“The RoboCup is not the goal, but a sample of what we do; it is not the final objective, the aim is to prepare students and undertake research in this area, and in the long run to consolidate a service robot at home ”, he concluded.
In the same contest, but in the Standard Platform League category, the robot “Takeshi”, with UNAM software, achieved fourth place in just its second international competition. It was in charge of Edgar de Jesús Vázquez Silva, a student of Mechatronics Engineering at FI and a member of the laboratory.
RoboCup is an international scientific initiative that aims to advance the development of intelligent robots. When it was established, in 1997, the original mission was to field a team of robots capable of winning against the World Cup champions of human football by 2050.
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