UChile HomeBreakers 2013 Team Description Paper

The UChile HomeBreakers team is an effort of the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Universidad de Chile. The team participates in the RoboCup @Home league since 2007, and its social robot Bender obtained the @Home Innovation Award in 2007 and 2008. In 2012 the team obtained the 6 place in the RoboCup competition. As a team with strong expertise in robot vision, object recognition, and human-robot interaction, we believe that we can provide interesting features to the league, such as: general-purpose object recognition, face analysis tools and human-robot interfaces. This year we have three important improvements in our social robot: the design and construction of new arms for objects manipulation, the full use of ROS as library and middleware for the communication of all internal modules (vision, speech, manipulation, navigation, etc.), and the use of state of the art visual tracking algorithms for allowing the robot to follow humans. It is also worth to mention the use of our robot in educational activities with school children.