RoboCup@Work
RoboCup@Work is the newest league in RoboCup, targeting the use of robots in work-related scenarios. RoboCup@Work utilizes proven ideas and concepts from other RoboCup competitions to tackle open research challenges in industrial and service robotics. With the introduction of this league RoboCup opens up to communities researching both classical and innovative robotics scenarios with very high relevance for the robotics industry.
Logistics
The RoboCup Logistics League (RCLL) is an application driven league inspired by the industrial scenario of a smart factory, where a number of machines provide manufacturing services to refine, assemble, or modify a workpiece eventually resulting in a final product. In this new paradigm, the factory provides a number of production technologies rather than production types. These can then be combined anew for each specific order. The idea is to allow cost effective production even for low volume or high variance products. Such a factory requires a more flexible logistics, where robots are a natural choice. The RCLL provides a testbed and benchmark of a comprehensible and yet meaningful size for such a system. We see the RCLL in a larger context as a central — but by no means exclusive — requirement for modern manufacturing industries. It focuses on research questions about task level planning and scheduling, automation in an industrial production workflow, and multi-robot system integration. It is meant to spawn interest in industry for current robotics research and to provide a benchmarking domain for such applications.
