Ever since the club was founded way back in the dark ages of robotics (i.e. 1989), many members have pondered about a robot that can fetch a beer from the fridge while watching your favorite game, a cough potato's liquid dream. So, how hard can it be? Many people have tried, many have failed.

Some club members have created a contest and written some rules for it. Here are the original contest rules.

The problem with strict rules is that they sometimes thwart creativity. It is not our goal to over-specify what we want, but merely ignite sparks of creativity to attack the problem. Since it is very difficult for robot hobbyists to design a single robot that can finish all tasks involved with fetching a beer, the scope of this 'contest' is more open-ended than our usual contests. We wouldn't even like to call it a contest but a CHALLENGE.

On regular occasions, we organize an event where people can enter to present their solution of one or more sub-problems. Anyone can participate. You do not need to present a fully-working robot (although that would be super-cool). Prototypes, proof-of-concepts, simulations, models, ... If you have it, we want to see it.

The audience will award points for:

- creativity (the cooler the idea, the more points)

- implementation (the better it is working, the more points)

note: no points for speed

Any of the following sub-domains are of interest to this particular challenge:

1) understand spoken commands to fetch a beer (the more variation in human speech it is able to distinguish, the better)

2) determine the location of the beer-requesting person

3) navigation - move to fridge and from fridge to beer-requesting person, avoiding fixed and moving obstacles.
Assume the robot has a map of the house and knows where the fridge is. However, he does not know in advance where the person requesting the beer. The robot also needs to be able to detect obstacles that are not in his map (e.g. other house guests, pets, furniture, ...). It would be really cool if the robot can still find the beer-requester that has moved position while the robot was out fetching the beer.

4) path planning - plan a path from the robot location (which can be anywhere in the house at the time of asking) to the fridge and from the fridge to the location of the person requesting the beer.

5) open a regular household fridge door

6) find a beer randomly placed in the fridge - This would be the optimal solution. But we would also like to see other creative solutions, like: a beer-cooler robot with automatic dispenser, or a beer dispenser placed in the fridge, or ....

7) retrieve a randomly placed beer from the fridge

8) deliver the beer to the requester

9) remove the bottle cap OR open the can 
 

Ideally all these tasks can be performed by one robot, but we are not adverse in seeing divide-and-conquer solutions, where different aspects of the tasks get handled by different robots.

Here are some video's of cool robots that can do this ....