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Behind the Journey, Endless Passion and Dedication

In the RoboCup China competition concluded in November, the Tongji University TJArk team once again won first place in the RoboCup@Home Standard Platform category, capturing the championship. We had the honor to interview Chen Lu from the School of Electronics and Information Engineering at Tongji University to learn about and delve into the story behind the champion team.

Tongji University has extensive experience in participating in the RoboCup China competition, achieving remarkable results. They have repeatedly won the championship in the NAO Robot Soccer Standard Platform category and won the bronze medal at the 2018 RoboCup World Cup. They also have an impressive performance in the RoboCup@Home Pepper robot category.

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Glory and Heritage

Behind a strong team lies the coordination and good atmosphere within the team. The TJArk team comes from the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (RAIL) at Tongji University. The team members include senior students in their second year of graduate studies and above who are responsible for guidance, as well as fourth-year students who go for practical learning, and first-year graduate students who are the main force in participating in the competition.

In this RoboCup competition, the team had 6-7 main members, supported by two teachers responsible for guidance and 3-4 new students participating in practice. Everyone worked according to their strengths, undertaking administrative and competitive tasks in an orderly manner. During the preparation period, the team held meetings every week to discuss and exchange ideas. On the eve of the final, everyone still worked overnight, actively preparing and going together in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, which is also an essential part of the team's success.

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"Why 'Easy' Victory?"

When talking about the feeling of winning the championship, Chen Lu said: "At the moment when the competition finish, knowing that we won the championship, there was a sense of relief."

Behind this "easy victory," there is hard preparation day and night. The continuous efforts for more than a month finally bore fruit, which is a testament to the team's hard work and a commendation for each member. Only at the moment when the dust settles can they enjoy a moment of relief and share great joy.

Tongji University's continuous championship in China competitions is inseparable from the cohesive team spirit. In addition to the development documents provided on the SoftBank Robotics official website during the preparation process, the guidance of senior team members and the accumulation of competition resources are the other two main ways to obtain resources. With the care and experience sharing from seniors, subsequent members continue to participate in the competition and achieve excellent results, passing on the good performance from generation to generation.

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Gains and Breakthroughs

For the Tongji University TJArk team, RoboCup is an influential and authoritative comprehensive technology competition, covering a wide range of fields such as mechanics, electronic information, network communication, artificial intelligence, etc. Not only is it comprehensive, but the content of RoboCup is also very creative, just like the RoboCup@Home competition system this time, which simulates home service scenarios and is full of novelty. In addition, difficult tasks in the competition can help improve technical levels; personally, participating in the competition has promoted the improvement of personal knowledge reserves and application capabilities. Therefore, RoboCup can comprehensively exercise students' abilities and is a robot competition full of gains.

In this competition, the team completed three projects in the competition, which are Receptionist, What’s that, Tidy up, which is a great test of the team's comprehensive abilities. The preparation process has greatly improved everyone's program design and engineering capabilities. Members also solved the robot's interactive navigation issues, improved positioning by appropriately increasing the boundaries of the scene, the width of collisions, and appropriately adjusting the state of the robot during movement, and finally achieved results.

After the competition, the TJArk team conducted a review meeting, archived competition materials and software and hardware resources by categories, and detailed the competition experience in written reports, leaving high-quality heritage experience for future participants.

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Pepper Accompanies the Journey Forward

When it comes to the Pepper robot, Chen Lu said that students will find it pleasing and very cute when they first see the robot. In terms of functionality, Pepper's voice, vision, navigation, joint control, and other technologies are mature and very stable. In the competition, Pepper has a complete set of interfaces and development documents, which are easy to develop and use. Compared with other robots, Pepper has unique sensors such as cameras, microphones, and has a more flexible torso and arms.

In addition to scientific research and competitions, Pepper also adds color to the campus life of Tongji University. For example, Pepper helps with campus reception, attendance clocking, and utilizes Pepper's excellent face recognition, voice, and navigation capabilities. The laboratory is also equipped with a relatively complete front-end and back-end web page management for Pepper, making it more convenient to maximize the value of the robot.

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"In the information society, information is the most frequently used medium for our communication, automated devices are an important carrier and application platform for the future industry and service industry," Chen Lu believes that for college students, accepting programming education and exercising programming capabilities through contact with robots is an effective way to exercise program design capabilities, which is also an essential ability for the future information society. For students interested in scientific research, robots are also a cutting-edge research direction with rich interdisciplinary and connotations.

In science fiction movies and novels, people have beautiful expectations for artificial intelligence, and in real life, artificial intelligence has been widely applied. In the future society, with the popularization of artificial intelligence technology, more mature and stable applications will also emerge, and humanoid service robots like Pepper will have more and more application scenarios.

"This competition is just the precipitation of the past. Only by summarizing and inheriting on the existing basis can we better move forward in the future," Pepper robots will also accompany us to step into the future together!

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