Demo Challenge

[Tijn van der Zant]

The Demo Challenge (DC) was a great success. It allows for
experimenting with specific scenarios and activities that are deemed
to be nearly impossible for present day technology. That is why it is
a Challenge, as in the Open Challenge, with a jury of Executives to
judge on the performance.

In the previous years we had Cooking (in China), The Bar (in Graz) and
The Restaurant (in Singapore). For this year I would like to do
something completely different, and doing The Laundry sounds like
something very useful, something right on the @Home topic and
something that I, personally, really don't like to do.

Some examples of tasks that the robot could do:
- clean the (bed) room of laundry lying on the floor
- put laundry in a basket
- get the basket to the washing machine
- empty the basket in the washing machine
- put laundry directly in the washing machine
- read the manual of the washing machine
- read the instruction on the soap box
- close the washing machine door
- turn on the washing machine on the correct program
- open the washing machine door
- recognize the type of laundry (colored, wool ,white, back, etc)
- get the clothes out of the machine
- put/hang the clothes to dry
- get the clothes from the drying device
- iron the clothes
- fold the clothes and put it in the cupboard

Even the basic tasks of The Laundry seem very complicated, and
therefor well suited for the Demo Challenge.

But...
If there is a better idea for the DC out there, please post it!

[Dirk Holz]

Hi all,

although doing the laundry sounds quite complicated, I think it's going
into the right direction. The demo challenges in the years before were
all situated outside of "the home", so going "back" into our personal
home setting sounds intuitive. However, laundry only seems to be a bit
too restrictive in my opinion. But we could easily extend it by having,
for example:
* laundry (with the examples given by Tijn)
* ironing
* putting clothes into appropriate furniture and/or getting it out
* doing stuff like vacuum cleaning the apartment (I do not think of
roombas here :)
* ...

[Tijn van der Zant]

Hi!,

I like the extensions. I know that doing the laundry is a very tough
one and I would be very surprised if there is a robot that can do it
completely. But that should not hold us back, because the purpose of
the demo challenge is to challenge ;-)
Perhaps we can have an even more general demo challenge which is about
cleaning the house. On the other hand, we could use 'cleaning the
house' as a general item for the demo challenge and change the
specifics every year. So we could have a cleaning the kitchen
(including operating a dishwasher), cleaning the dinner table, clean
up the toys from the children, etc. We can even change the nae of the
Demo Challenge into the Cleaning Challenge.

-Tijn

[Javier Ruiz-del-Solar]

I believe it is good idea to have a more general demo challenge: cleaning the house.

The demo could be very open, "cleaning the house" or specific "cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the leaving room, etc."

------------------------------------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Javier Ruiz-del-Solar
Universidad de Chile
Department of Electrical Engineering
Av. Tupper 2007, 837-0451 Santiago, Chile

Ph. +56-2-978 4207
Fax +56-2-6720162
Email: jru...@ing.uchile.cl
WWW: http://www.cec.uchile.cl/~jruizd

[Jesus Savage]

I agree that the demo challenge will be the robot doing the laundry.

Enclosed is a picture of a house that has several robots doing
different things, one is an arm
robot that is in the laundry room, it takes the dirty clothes, that a
mobile robot brought, and it puts in the laundry machine, then it
takes them out of it an it puts them in the drier machine and finally
it irons them.

Thus we could have a test in which a mobile robot collects the clothes
from the house's rooms and it delivers
them to the laundry robot and after the cloths are cleaned and ironed
it delivers back to one of the rooms.

Jesus

[Luca Iocchi]

'Cleaning the house' as a general theme for the Demo Challenge is
perfect.

If some task is too difficult for a robot, we can suggest to
demonstrate nice human-robot coordination.
For example, an easy version of what Jesus is proposing, is that the
robot collects and brings dirty clothes to a human,
who will take care of actual laundry/ironing/... and then s/he will
return the clothes to the robot again that has to bring them back in
the right places.

[Javier Ruiz-del-Solar]

I agree.

[Dirk Holz]

The only issue I have with focusing on laundry-related things is that
clothes are among the most difficult objects to manipulate. So I'd
prefer to definitely have a more 'general' cleaning theme, which would
also allow to colloct, manipulate objects other than clothes

[Luca Iocchi]

I think 'cleaning the house' is general enough. The clothes were only
a possible example.

L.

[Dirk Holz]

'Cleaning the house' is general enough, yes. And I'd be totally fine
with that.

[Tijn van der Zant]

As long as there's a storyline, I'm fine with cleaning the house (so
not picking up the clothes, and then pick up a cup from the kitchen
table, and then ironing, since that does not make sense (unless you
have a reaaaaaaalllllly good story around it... ))