Humanoids 2017 photo competition and winners

The Humanoids 2017 conference earlier this month hosted an excellent photo competition. I was lucky to be one of the judges, along with Erico Guizzo from IEEE Spectrum, and Giorgio Metta as awards chair.

The decision, which was tough given the excellent submissions, was based on social media votes and scores for originality, creativity, photo structure, and tech or fun factor.

The overall winner for Best Humanoid Photo featured a pensive iCub and was entitled “To be, or not to be” by Pedro Vicente from the Vislab in Lisbon.

Title: “To be, or not to be”
Robot: iCub
Photo by: Pedro Vicente, Vislab@ISR-Lisboa

Finalists, in no particular order, were:

Title: “One who doesn’t throw the dice can never expect to score a six. One who doesn’t throw the ball can never expect to learn to juggle.”
Robot: NICO ( Neuro-Inspired COmpanion )
Photo by: Erik Strahl, Universität Hamburg (University of Hamburg, Germany).

Title: “Ready to explore (TORO accompanied by LRU, two experimental robots for verifying concepts for planetary exploration)”
Robot: Toro, LRU
Photo by: Maximo A. Roa, Christian Ott, Johannes Englsberger, Bernd Henze, Alexander Werner, Oliver Porges, DLR – German Aerospace Center

Title: “Sweaty goes Japan”
Robot: Sweaty
Photo by: Heitz, Benjamin, University Offenburg

The winner for Best Funny Humanoid was this picture of a frustrated SABIAN entitled “If only I had a self-driving car” by Marco Moscato at the Biorobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.