The robot household challenge is one of the most important problems of service robotics, and the advances in this area are crucial for the commercialization of robotics and the wide adoption of robots in society. The aim of the workshop is to propel the discussion on the topic of tackling the household challenge and facilitate sharing of valuable research results and insights. The robot skills relevant for the household challenge are mobile pick and place, cutting, pouring, wiping, using home appliances, handling soft objects, and other actions of meal preparation and cleaning. With the goal of establishing the workshop as a yearly recurring event, we will encourage the participants to also demonstrate and share implementations, and we will provide an open-source infrastructure for doing so for those interested. The long-term goal of the workshop is to build a vibrant community around the robot household challenge.

Competitions and benchmarks regarding household robotics are proposed and conducted in different communities, including Robocup@Home and similar competitions, embodied AI in computer vision and machine learning, research networks such as the European network of excellence centers in robotics (EUROBIN), and large-scale, long-term research projects such as the EASE household challenge of the Collaborative Research Center EASE (Everyday Activity Science and Engineering).

The workshop will host presentations, poster sessions, and a panel. In the latter, we will facilitate a discussion on the criteria that autonomous household robots should exhibit and discuss the importance of different criteria such as explainability, lifetime learning, and transferability to new contexts. We would like the workshop to be a platform for hosting a competition in the area of robot household actions, where people could collaborate on and compete with complementary and alternative approaches. The competition will concentrate on one specific topic each year, such as setting a table, preparing a sandwich, sorting groceries into the shelves, etc. Additionally, we will present one approach to tackling the household challenge that our lab has been working on for more than fifteen years. We will also provide our open-source infrastructure where interested researchers can contribute their demonstrations in a virtual building setting.a