Hefei, China, 22 July 2015 – Two Universiti Teknologi Malayisa (UTM) Electrical Engineering students represented Malaysia at the RoboCup 2015 World Championship held in Hefei, China. This was UTM’s first participation at the annual robotic competition that aims to promote robotics and artificial intelligence research.
The UTM student team, namely Seow Yip Loon (4th Year Electrical – Mechatronic undergraduate) and Nicole Tham Lei May(2nd Year Electrical – Electronic undergraduate) under the tutelage of Dr. Yeong Che Fai from the UTM Centre of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIRO), collaborated with Dr Jeffrey Too Chuan Tan from the University of Tokyo, Japan and Associate Profesor Feng Duang from Nankai University, China. Together, they formed the KameRider team and competed in the @Home Robot league.
This year’s @Home competition saw 17 teams from Germany, Mexico, Holland, Taiwan, Japan, Chile, Brazil, China and Malaysia competing. In the competition, competing teams need to design and develop a service robot that can perform multi tasks such as navigation, manipulation, speech recognition, person recognition, and GPSR. A set of benchmark tests is used to evaluate the robots’ abilities and performance in a realistic non-standardized home environment setting.
Considering this is UTM’s first foray into the competition, the team did well by qualifying for the second round. The final results placed KameRider in 7th position the league.
The championship was won by the Homer team from the University of Koblenz, Landau, Germany. The first runner up was the WrightEagle team from the University of Science and Technology of China, while the second runner up was the ToBI team from Biefeld University of Germany.
A total of 175 robot teams from 47 different countries took part in this RoboCup 2015 World Championship held in Hefei, China. RoboCup comprises several contests running concurrently, emphasizing different specialty such as Soccer, Rescue, @Home, @Work and Logistics.
The next RoboCup World Championship will be held in Leipzig, Germany in 2016 and in Nagoya, Japan in 2017.
KameRider’s representative from UTM Malaysia. From Left: Dr Yeong Che Fai, Nicole Tham Lei May and Seow Yip Loon.)
KameRider’s full team comprising Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Nangkai University, China and University of Tokyo, Japan
