Day one at #ScirocChallenge: social robots and humans meet in a shopping mall

The ERL Smart Cities Robotics Challenge (SciRoc Challenge) includes five different episodes around the topic of smart shopping. Ten teams from five different countries have travelled to Milton Keynes, UK, to participate in this unique biennial event that brings together the three European Robotics League (ERL) competitions: consumer, professional and emergency. SciRoc challenge adds the new concept of episodes to the ERL benchmarking methodology. An episode aims at targeting one or two functionalities (tested during a specific ERL Functionality Benchmark, FBM) within an operational context. In order to complete an episode, the robot might also be required to integrate other functionalities commonly used in a social environment, such as navigation or speech recognition.