History

The first steps towards the first group of research in robots at Centro Universitário FEI was made by Prof. Reinaldo Bianchi in 2002 with the first groups of students in RoboCup Simulation 2D. In 2003, with the experience of Prof Reinaldo Bianchi who have participated in the soccer robot group in USP since 1998, together with Prof. Flavio Tonidandel, developed the first robots for Very Small Size Category of the IEEE Robotic Competition, becoming vice-champion in 2003. In 2004, during the First Brazilian Competition on Intelligent Robots (a competition were the IEEE Robot Competition was held together with the First Brazilian RoboCup), our team became Brazilian Champion in the IEEE Very Small category. In the same competition, our first team developed for the RoboCup Small Size League became vice-champion in 2004, Very Small Size team became Champion again, and our first 2D RoboCup Simulation team was the Brazilian champion.

The institution RoboCup Small Size League team, called RoboFEI, won for the first time the Brazilian Robocup in 2010, and is currently the Brazilian champion, winning the championship 6 times in a row (from 2010 to 2015). This team takes part in the RoboCup World Competition since 2009, and the best result we had was in 2012, when we stayed among the 8 top teams.

After developing robotic soccer players for the last 15 years, we now developed a team to compete in the RoboCup Humanoid League. The development of this team started in 2012 after 3 years of research and development in our first humanoid robot design from scratch. Now, with soccer robots established on competitions and researches, we are interested also on service and social robots. In that way, we start to develop also a @Home team to compete in Robocup.

In 2014 the FEI team organized the RoboCup in Brazil and started competitions in domestic service robotics. In 2015 Prof. Plinio Aquino started the research and development of the FEI robotic platform to participate in this new type of competition in RoboCup. In this way, the FEI started participating in the domestic assistance category in 2015 with the robot Judith. In 2017, the development of the current platform called HERA began. It got third place in the Latin American Robotics Competition in 2015. It is currently the five-time Latin American champion team, accumulating the first place titles in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. It also participated in the world edition of RoboCup in 2016 (@Germany) - first international participation. In 2018 (@Canada) and 2019 (@Australia) actively participated in the OPL @Home league gaining experience. In 2022 in Thailand, it won first place in the RoboCup World considering the Service Robotics category (RoboCup@Home).

Also back in 2022, a brand-new team inside RoboFEI started: RoboFEI @Work. The main goal of this team is to compete at the RoboCup @Work, league that targets the use of robots in work-related scenarios.