In 2019 the Centre entered a team in the RoboCup@Home Challenge with a butler-come-garbo robot named Rocky who can take out the garbage! Something of a Frankenstein, Rocky was built from a mish-mash of robots and technology found in the Centre’s labs and was placed sixth in our first attempt at the RoboCup@Home challenge which was a great result.
The naming process for a robot often involves an interesting story….
For Rocky, the name simply came out of observing the robot move: the robot had a tendency to “rock” between resting on the front & back casters due to the weight of the arm sitting up high on the robot. Originally it was so bad we were terrified of it face planting as it drove. Most of the rocking was gone after some clever engineering from Steve involving ballast counter-weights & tweaking springiness in the wheels, but the name still remained. Clearly a robot named by a group of engineers!
(Shakey was also an early contender but we thought that would be treading on sacred robotics ground: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakey_the_robot)