Our team, Hibikino-Musashi@Home (HMA), was founded in 2010. It is based in Japan in the Kitakyushu Science and Research Park. Since 2010, we have annually participated in the RoboCup@Home Japan Open competition in the open platform league (OPL).We participated as an open platform league team in the 2017 Nagoya RoboCup competition and as a domestic standard platform league (DSPL) team in the 2017 Nagoya, 2018 Montreal, 2019 Sydney, and 2021 Worldwide RoboCup competitions.We also participated in theWorld Robot Challenge (WRC) 2018 in the service-robotics category of the partner-robot challenge (real space) and won first place. Currently, we have 27 members from nine different laboratories within the Kyushu Institute of Technology and the university of Kitakyushu. In this paper, we introduce the activities that have been performed by our team and the technologies that we use.

We participated in the RoboCup 2018 competition in Montreal with our newly developed BoldBot based on the Darwin-OP and mostly self-printed custom parts. This paper is about the lessons learnt from that competition and further developments for the RoboCup 2019 competition. Firstly, we briefly introduce the team along with an overview of past achievements. We then present a simple, standalone 2D simulator we use for simplifying the entry for new members with making basic RoboCup concepts quickly accessible. We describe our approach for semantic-segmentation for our vision used in the 2018 competition, which replaced the lookup-table (LUT) implementation we had before. We also discuss the extra structural support we plan to add to the printed parts of the BoldBot and our transition to ROS 2 as our new middleware. Lastly, we will present a collection of open-source contributions of our team.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these same properties in order to create resilient machines. The nature of soft materials, however, presents considerable challenges to aspects of design, construction, and control -- and up until now, the vast majority of gaits for soft robots have been hand-designed through empirical trial-and-error.

RoboCup brings together some of the finest minds in technology from around the world. Established in 1997, its mission is to create a team of robots capable of beating the human World Cup champions by 2050. Judging by this footage, they still have some way to go.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Kuka, who has a near monopoly on industrial robots that are painted orange, is now getting into consumer robots. Our i-do concept study, that we presented at Hannover Fair 2018, goes a considerable step further, however.