At the RoboSoft 2023 Competition held in conjunction with the 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft 2023), the SUTD-led team won first prize for the Best Manipulation Award.
This year, the RoboSoft Competition focused on real-world robot applications and the team led by SUTD’s Bio-inspired Robotics and Design Laboratory (BRD Lab) took on the challenge based on the scenario of ‘food handling for trays preparation’. The manipulation tasks were designed to evaluate advances in gripper materials, grasping strategies, system integration, autonomy, and execution speed and repeatability.
The competition centered around assembling a tray of food, a scenario that is applicable in healthcare, air travel, food & beverage, hospitality, and other service industries. Robots were tasked to autonomously assemble as many complete food trays as possible within a specified time limit. Each food tray had to contain seven different types of items from a diverse range including sausages, meatballs, green beans, cooked spaghetti noodles, cookies, fried eggs, local pastry snacks and orange juice.
Participants included accomplished teams from institutes renowned for their expertise in soft grasping, such as École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Istituto Italiano di Technologia (IIT), National University of Singapore (NUS), Ritsumeikan University, and University of Bristol.
The SUTD-led team comprised:
- Saikrishna Dontu (Senior Research Assistant, EPD/BRD Lab & Master of Engineering alumni, Class of 2021)
- Virbhadrappa Swaminath Kalburgi (Senior Research Assistant, ISTD/Multi-agent Robot Vision & Learning Laboratory)
- Shrutika Vishal Thengane (Senior Research Assistant, ISTD/Multi-agent Robot Vision & Learning Laboratory)
- Chooi An Rong Aaron (Research Assistant, EPD/BRD Lab & PhD student)
- Audelia Gumarus Dharmawan (Research Assistant, EPD/Articulated Systems and Biomechanics Group)
- Elgar Vikram Kanhere (Research Fellow, EPD/BRD Lab)
- Thileepan Stalin (PhD student, EPD/BRD Lab)
- Arturo Castillo Ugalde (PhD student, EPD/BRD Lab)
- Chidanand Hegde (CREATE-SHARE, Smart Grippers for Soft Robotics)
- Jiangtao Su (CREATE-SHARE, Smart Grippers for Soft Robotics)
- Joel Tan (CREATE-SHARE, Smart Grippers for Soft Robotics)
Original source from: https://sutd.edu.sg/About/Accolades/Faculty-Staff-Accolades/2023