A Domestic Assistive Robot Developed Through Robot Competitions∗

Scientific robot competitions are considered a powerful drive for advancing the state-of-the-art in robotics research and development. This paper describes the research objectives and technical information of the SocRob@Home team who has been representing the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR) from the Instituto Superior Técnico since 1998 in different robot competitions. This paper discusses in detail the hardware and software systems of our domestic robots and present algorithms used for navigation, manipulation, people and object recognition, human-robot interaction and decision making. It also presents the outcome of the participation of the team in the RoCKIn 2015 competition in Lisbon.