Ricerc@Sapienza

RoboCup has been a vehicle for promoting robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) research by offering a publicly appealing but formidable challenge. One effective way to promote science and engineering research is to set a challenging long-term goal. RoboCup was founded with such a goal: By 2050, have a team of soccer robots defeat the team of World Cup champions. Our challenging goal has been expanded to include teams of rescue robots, those that service humans at home or in manufacturing tasks, and robotics soccer, rescue, and dancing motion challenges for educating children.

In this paper, we describe a navigation system requiring very few computational resources, but still providing performance comparable with commonly used tools in the ROS universe. This lightweight navigation system is thus suitable for robots with low computational resources and provides interfaces for both ROS and NAOqi middlewares.

Comparing to the learning contents in high school level robotics education leads us to discover a gap of missing skill sets required in university level robotics development. Our objective in this work is to bridge this gap by outreaching our development in RoboCup@Home Education. We have conducted our studied in several RoboCup events to establish new local communities. We have run hands-on robot building workshop, and finally gauge the project outcome by organizing the Education Challenge.