IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2015 - 8

COMPETITIONS

Toward the Robot Butler:
the HUMABOT Challenge
By Enric Cervera, Juan Carlos García, and Pedro J. Sanz

he HUMABOT Challenge, the
official robot competition for
the 2014 IEEE Robotics and
Automation Society (RAS) International Conference on Humanoid
Robots (Humanoids 2014), was held
during the conference in Madrid, Spain,
18-20 November. After running the
Humanoids conference around the
world for a long time, this was the first
time that a competition was organized
jointly with the event. This article highlights some of the logistic challenges
and successes of the new competition.
Inspiration and Aim
The original idea for the competition
was due to Prof. Carlos Balaguer, general
chair of Humanoids 2014. Prof.
Balaguer was the coordinator of the
Spanish Robotics Network from 2006 to
2009. During that period, he was a forefather of a national humanoids competition (CEABOT), which today is a
well-known and consolidated undergraduate humanoid robot competition.
In the CEABOT competition, the winner is in charge of organizing the next
edition. Universitat Jaume I (UJI) has
been participating since 2007 and has
won four years consecutively (20072010). Although the CEABOT winner is
in charge of organizing the next edition,
UJI has been a coorganizer of the competition since 2010. Therefore, due to
their long-time experience, Prof.
Balaguer chose UJI as the organizer of
the first HUMABOT Challenge.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2015.2418511
Date of publication: 18 June 2015

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

june 2015

A year before the challenge, during the
preliminary planning stage, we envisioned
a competition including three different
segments, depending on the humanoid
platform size selected: mini, midsize, or
large. The mini platform was the easiest
since CEABOT is based on it, and we had
experience with this type of platform [1]
[2]. However, the capabilities of mini platforms (e.g., Robonova) are much more
limited than those of the midsize segment
(e.g., NAO and DARwIn-Op), with which
we also have previous experience [3]. In
addition, there are well-established international competitions for midsize platforms (e.g., RoboCup). The large
humanoids segment relies exclusively on a
specific platform, and the competition is
sponsored by a company. Thus, after considering all of the restrictions (economic,
international impact, and so on), it was decided to drastically simplify the competition, focusing exclusively on midsize
humanoid platforms around 50-cm tall,
making the use of popular platforms like
NAO and DARwIn-Op possible.
Our aim was to design a competition
with an affordable entry level suitable for
graduate students interested in pursuing a
Ph.D. degree in robotics. In our experience, using real robots in teaching with
undergraduate students has been accompanied by an increase in the enrollment
rates in robotics studies [4]. We tried not
to overlap with existing competitions like
RoboCup@Home, although both share
some common principles, e.g., the robot
must perform manipulation tasks in a
domestic environment [5]. We aimed to
define three realistic problems that could
be easily stated in a single sentence yet

provide a significant challenge with the
available resources.
Logistic Issues
In parallel to design scenarios and rules
for the competition, an international
committee to assist in spreading the
event worldwide was selected a year
before the challenge. The committee
consisted of
● Pedro Lima, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal
● Luca Iocchi, Università di Roma "La
Sapienza," Italy
● Sven Behnke, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn,
Germany
● Peter Stone, University of Texas,
United States
● Eiichi Yoshida, CNRS-AIST Joint
Research Laboratory, Japan
● Alan F.T. Winfield, University of West
England, Bristol, United Kingdom
● Pedro J. Sanz, UJI, Spain (competition chair).
Likewise, a local committee was created
to design and implement all the logistical details of this competition, consisting of
● Enric Cervera, UJI, Spain
● Juan C. García, UJI, Spain
● Guillem Alenyà, Insitut de Robòtica
Industrial-CSIC, University of Catalonia, Spain
● Francisco Blanes, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
● Fernando Gómez, Universidad de
Huelva, Spain
● Sam Pfeiffer, PAL Robotics, Spain.
The official Web site of the event was
made available to the participants from

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