STAI CDT PhD students Matt Barker, Jared Swift, and Zoe Evans represented King’s College London as part of the Learning Autonomous Service Robots (LASR) team, achieving an impressive 4th place overall in the RoboCup@Home Open Platform League at RoboCup 2025.
The LASR team brings together students to compete in service robot challenges at major competitions, like RoboCup. It is both a research and teaching platform, in which undergraduate students work side by side with PhD students. RoboCup@Home is the world’s largest annual competition for autonomous service robots, with strong relevance to future personal and domestic applications. It focuses on areas such as human–robot interaction, computer vision, adaptive behaviours, and system integration. The event took place in July in Salvador, Brasil.
(photo credit Matteo Leonetti)
In the RoboCup@Home league, teams are tested on their robots’ ability to operate in realistic, non-standardised home environments — from navigating and mapping dynamic spaces, to recognising and manipulating objects, to engaging naturally with people. During the competition, the LASR team had to program their robot to autonomously perform a range of household tasks, from acting as a party host to helping to store groceries.
The LASR team achieved their best ever results at this year’s competition, making it into the second stage of the competition in second position, before finishing stage 2 in fourth place overall (out of 15).
Reflecting on the experience, Matt Barker shared:
“The competition was a very rewarding experience. As with any competitive environment, it has its highs and lows, but overall, it was a great experience! One highlight was interactions with the general public — it was great to see adults and children alike excited and enthusiastic about watching robots!”
He added that the people of Salvador made the event even more memorable:
“All the locals in Salvador were incredibly friendly, talkative, and helpful (much more so than the average Londoner!). All the other teams at RoboCup were also awesome — it was great to discuss ideas about robotics with them, as well as networking in general.”
For Zoe Evans, the collaborative spirit of the competition stood out:
“All the teams, who had come from around the world, had a very supportive and collaborative relationship with each other. We wanted each other to do well, and shared a lot of the things we had learnt.”
Another highlight for Zoe was mentoring the younger members of the team:
“It was rewarding to watch [the undergraduates] develop their understanding of and passion for robotics.”
Jared Swift highlighted the team’s achievement with pride:
“This was my 3rd RoboCup that I have attended with the team, and the most enjoyable one by far — perhaps since it was the most successful one! We take part in the @Home division of RoboCup, in the Open Platform league. In the Open Platform league, teams are allowed to use custom robots of their own choice. We instead are using a pre-built TIAGo robot from PAL Robotics, which we have not customised whatsoever, instead relying on the hardware and sensors that come out-of-the-box. Other teams who use a TIAGo have heavily customised their robot, giving it additional sensors etc., which makes the tasks potentially easier to solve. Therefore, I was very proud that we were able to be so competitive, coming 4th place, without making any customisations.”
Zoe, Matt, and Jared agreed that alongside the technical challenges, meeting and working with other teams from across the world was one of the most enjoyable parts of RoboCup 2025.
We’re very proud of Zoe, Matt and Jared – and congratulations to the whole LASR team on their amazing achievement,