14 September 2021
Reply faced the best European Robotics teams in the 2021 edition of the SciRoc Challenge and won the "Episode 01 - Deliver Coffee Shops Orders" with its Robotics Team. The team was able to demonstrate the potential and efficiency of the TIAGo Robot and Hey5 robotic hand.
Now in its second edition, the SciRoc Challenge is an EU-H2020 funded project supporting the European Robotics League (ERL), aimed at bringing ERL competitions to smart cities. The 2021 edition was held at Palazzo Re Enzo in Bologna from 6th to 10th September 2021 and focused “Smart Inclusion”. This year 13 international teams competed in 5 “episodes”; each one of them linked to a specific research field.
The Reply Team registered for two of the five competition episodes – “Deliver Coffee Shop Orders” and “Sign Language Generation / Interpretation”.
The Reply Team won the first one which required to assist the staff of a Coffee Shop in taking care of their customers through a robot able to recognise the status of the tables via object recognition, take the customers' orders via voice recognition and carry out the service directly at the table.
The Reply Robotics Team solved the challenge with the help of the TIAGo robot and the integrated Hey5 robotic hand and programmed it to complete all the required tasks with the highest possible accuracy and efficiency. Before the challenge, the team trained the robot for the different requirements. During the five days of the challenge, all of the robot's functionalities were tested and the Reply Team worked on continuous improvements to make the robot's tasks more precise. Based on the demonstrated precision and the number of tasks completed the Reply Robotics Team scored the victory.
The Reply squad, composed of Giacomo Maccagni (Cluster Reply), Lorenzo Ratti (Logistics Reply), Marcus Grabler (Autonomous Reply) and Ricardo Cedillo (Autonomous Reply), was able to integrate their different skills needed to accomplish the tasks within the challenge: Object Recognition, Machine Learning, Object Detection and Software Engineering.
Following this victory, Team Reply will continue to work with TIAGo to further refine its competencies ahead of the upcoming challenges.