During the World Championship RoboCup 2013 in Eindhoven, Maastricht University’s SwarmLab@Work team has won the world title within the category RoboCup@Work, being the only Dutch team to win a world title. The contest started on Thursday 27 June with the first tests and finished yesterday. A record number of 40,000 people visited the RoboCup. Dr. Karl Tuyls, head of the SwarmLab: “The fact that we, as newcomers, were able to conquer the world title shows that we have a very talented team with members who complement each other perfectly.”

Within 15 different leagues, 2500 participants from 40 countries competed with all kinds of soccer robots, work robots, care robots, rescue robots and dance robots. The team from UM’s Department of Knowledge Engineering came in first in their category @Work, in which a total of five teams participated. In the finals, the SwarmLab team left previous world champion Luh-bots from Hannover far behind. Tuyls:”We’d already created a distance after performing the first tasks, which we did nearly perfectly. In the finals, the two teams had to perform a ‘basic transportation task’, parallel to each other. We ended up taking a lead with more than 1000 points.” For a detailed overview of the scores, please refer to the SwarmLab@work website.

The UM team was also granted an award for ‘best newcomer’ by Kuka Robotics, the company which produces the robots for the @Work competition.

The @Work competition targets the use of robots in various work-related scenarios, such as navigating to specific locations and moving objects. It aims to foster the research and development of innovative mobile robots for current and future industrial applications, where robots cooperate with humans on complex tasks ranging from manufacturing and automation to general logistics.

The SwarmLab team consists of the following members: Sjriek Alers, Daniel Claes, Rik Claessens, Joscha Fossel, Daniel Hennes, Karl Tuyls and Gerhard Weiss.