Team Interview #5< | >

We recently spoke with Mauricio Matamoros, Pumas team member at University of Mexico (UNAM) about the upcoming RoCKIn2015 Challenge. Here's what they had to say about their mission, vision and preparation for the final event!

Hello Mauricio - thank you for joining us today. To start with, could you give us a bit of background information on your team, its aims and mission?

Team Pumas was started in 2004 by Dr. Savage with the aim of encouraging bachelor and master students to apply their knowledge. The team quickly grew from labyrinth-solving and beach-cleaning robots to home assistants and football players. Right now, our goal is to develop a robot capable of doing all the chores we don't like to do.

What appeals to you about RoCKIn and how does it complement your research and personal development goals? What about robot competitions more generally?

I'm working in human-robot interaction, specifically natural language understanding. RoCKIn gives me the best possible unexpected scenarios to test my hypothesis. Other robot competitions are the same, they give you the chance to try what you know should work in the real world, but doesn't, and most importantly: to find out, why?

Have you been involved in robotic competitions before? If so, what were some of the highlights for you?

I've been participating in RoboCup since 2009 along with some other national tournaments as both team and committee member. In these, I've seen several groups of experts working hard to make a highly advanced hardware to behave properly in a human environment while performing incredibly complex tasks which non-experts wouldn't think were challenging at all. Service robotics is one of the most challenging branches, but unfortunately performing chores doesn't look so awesome, which I think can be a real headache for the organizers. Competitions helps us realize how far we are from achieving our goal but also the massive impact that what we are doing could have on people's lives, even if it is just serving coffee.

What role do you think competitions have in furthering innovation in robotics?

Keeping science grounded. When you are performing research, often you have strong assumptions which lead to solving very specific problems within a strict setup. Competitions break that: everything may happen completely differently from what you expected and the robot should react in the same way a human would do, therefore your approaches must be generally applicable and your algorithms must be as robust as possible.

How are your preparations for RoCKIn2015 going? What are you finding to be the most challenging areas?

Preparations are driving us all crazy but we are really enthusiastic, this is a great opportunity to test our advances in robotics and see Justina (our robot) on the catwalk. Right now we are migrating from our old legacy middleware to ROS and that's the biggest challenge: most of our software tends to crash all the time in Linux, so every non-crash is a great success.

And finally, what do you think the future holds for domestic service robotics?

I like to believe that once we have robots in our houses we will spend our time in meaningful activities such as taking care of each other, playing sports, studying philosophy, or scientific research instead of on all those repetitive but necessary chores. However this is quite naive; at the very beginning robots will be accessible only to people with resources and some people may lose their jobs after being replaced by robots. Those are problems we should address as part of robotics research.

Thanks for your time Mauricio - we're looking forward to seeing you in Lisbon!