On RoboCup@Home — Past, Present and Future of a Scientific Competition for Service Robots.

RoboCup@Home is an application-oriented league within the annual RoboCup events. It focuses on domestic service robots and mobile manipulators interacting with human users. Participating robots need to solve tasks ranging from following and guiding human users to delivering objects, e.g., in a supermarket. In this paper, we present the @Home league and how it evolved over the last seven years since its existence. We place particular emphasis on how we evaluate the teams’ performances over the years and how we use the obtained statistics to drive the development of the league. This process is shown in detail on two examples—following human guides, and finding and manipulating objects. Finally, we will outline possible future directions and developments.