UTBM was one of three European universities selected for the global challenge in personal assistance robotics, the WRS—World Robot Summit,

(alongside the University of Koblenz and the University of Oxford) held in Tokyo on October 17 by the Japanese government and Toyota, Japan’s leading automaker.
A total of 15 teams from around the world competed in this international robotics summit.
It was up to them to put their heads together to equip the robots—provided by Toyota in late August 2018 to each team, with the intelligence to tackle two challenges during the competition:
retrieving an object and tidying up a room—tasks that had to be completed within a set time limit.

These capabilities were fully realized by the “Eighty-eight” robot, valued at €60,000 and provided to UTBM by Toyota, thanks to the development work carried out by the PENA (Environmental Perception and Autonomous Navigation) team at UTBM’s Electronics, Computing, and Imaging Laboratory.

The robot can find a book, a thermos, a box of tea or coffee, or a laptop, and bring one of these items to the person who asked for it, or put toys and other items scattered around a room back in their proper places.

At the end of the competition, UTBM’s “Transportation and Mobility” research team—composed of five faculty researchers—ranked fifth among all participating teams (first among European teams, ahead of four Japanese universities), thereby securing access to the Droïde for two more years until the next competition.