The “SKUBA-Jr” Student team from the Faculty of Engineering, Kasetsart University, recently received the Best Technical Paper and People’s Choice Award from the World RoboCup 2021 Online Challenge robotics competition in the category of RoboCup@Home EDU or home use robot EDU, Open Category. The event was organized by the RoboCup Federation which encompasses professors from several universities around the world in its Technical Committee.
This year’s World RoboCup was originally scheduled to be held in France, but due to the COVID-19 outbreak there was a change in the competition’s format towards online, and was led by the organizing team from France. The contest’s sponsors were SoftBank Robotics, MathWorks, FESTO, J.P. Morgan and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society. The event was held between 22 and 28 June 2021 for the competition and from 29 to 30 June 2021 for the Symposium and Conference.
The Best Technical Paper Award is awarded to teams with the best results in robotics technology research and has an innovative impact that can be developed further into useful applications.
The People’s Choice Award is an award given to a team that is voted on by a panel of judges, contestants and audience members by evaluating the results of the video competition demonstrating their abilities and participation in the competition.
The World RoboCup is the world’s largest robotics competition, comparable to the human Olympics. The first event, held in 1996, featured a variety of robot contests, such as soccer robots, rescue robots and domestic robots.
The RoboCup @ Home EDU competition is a domestic robotics competition that is not focused on competition alone but also on research studies. Therefore, there are a lot of people interested in this event. The SKUBA-Jr team participated in the Open version, which is a tournament format for university students and robot companies from all countries in the world to compete in. This year, there 7 teams qualified for the final round, hailing from Thailand, Japan, Malaysia, Canada, the United States and China.