Happy Robot for RoboCup2026

This is the official website of the Happy Robot team from Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Japan, for evaluation in the RoboCup World Championship 2026, RoboCup@Home League.

Team Video

Photo of the robot Happy Edu

Since 2015, our robots have featured a friendly, approachable design to encourage acceptance among children, women, and the elderly in home environments. Based on this philosophy, we developed Happy Edu (Fig.1) in 2023—a small, lightweight, and affordable open-hardware robot aimed at lowering entry barriers for new RoboCup@Home teams.　For RoboCup 2026, we are implementing the following enhancements:

• Replacement of the 2D LiDAR with a 3D LiDAR

• Extension of the robot arm to 6 DoF with improved payload performance

Description of the approaches and information on scientific achievements

The Happy Robot team develops an open-hardware platform Happy Edu to lower entry barriers for RoboCup@Home and promote modular, extensible service robots. Our approach integrates multimodal perception, including speech interaction, open-vocabulary object recognition, and human-aware understanding.

Scientific achievements include a cost-effective 3D LiDAR–based re-identifiable human-following system that enables re-detection even after occlusion, ensuring robust tracking in domestic environments. We also proposed a foundation-model-driven planning framework for shelf display and disposal tasks, enabling adaptive decision-making without handcrafted rules. Additionally, we developed a robotic hand with four primitive motions for Bento assembly and a Fluorescent AR Marker method for automatic 6DoF pose annotation and estimation.

Team Descripton Paper

• HappyRobotTDP2026

Team Web Site

• https://demura.net/happyrobot2026

GitHub

• Team GitHub

Publications

• Books
  • This link contains a detailed explanation of the book listed below.
  • Kosei Demura, Yoshinobu Hagiwara, Yasuhiro Masutani, Jeffrey Too Chuan TAN: Introduction to AI Robot – Building and Learning with ROS2 and Python – , Revised Second Edition (in Japanese), Kodansha Ltd., Publishers, Feb, 2025 (Fig.2)
  • Kosei Demura, Yoshinobu Hagiwara, Yasuhiro Masutani, Jeffrey Too ChuaTAN: Introduction to AI Robot – Building and Learning with ROS2 and Python –, First Edition (in Japanese), Kodansha Ltd., Publishers, Aug, 2022 (Fig.3)

    
    
    

    
    
    

     

• Journal Papers
  • This link is a list of papers published in the journal since 2020.

Team members

• Adviser: Prof. Kosei Demura, Dept. of Robotics, Kanazawa Institute of Technology. JAPAN
• Team Leader: Takumi Shimada
• Members: Aoi Hayashi, Natsuki Sasaki, Keitatsu Sawanobori, Yoshiki Takahashi, Masaya Watanabe
• Contact Person: Kosei Demura

Previous participation in RoboCup, local RoboCup tournaments, and rankings

• RoboCup World Championship
  • 2nd place in 2024 (@Home Playground)
  • 2nd place in 2023 (@Home Education Workshop and Challenge)
  • 5th place in 2018 (@Home league)
  • 9th place in 2017 (@Home league)
  • 8th place in 2016 (@Home league)
  • 9th place in 2015 (@Home league)
• RoboCup Japan Open
  • 3rd place in 2025 (Competition, @Home OPL)
  • 2nd place in 2025 (Open challenge, @Home OPL)
  • 3rd place in 2024 (Competition, @Home Bridge Competion)
  • 1st place in 2024 (Open challenge, @Home OPL)
  • 1st place in 2023 (Competition, @Home Education)
  • 1st place in 2022 (Competition, @Home Education)
  • 3rd place in 2017 (Competition, @Home OPL)
  • 1st place in 2026 (Competition, @Home Education)

The End