RoboCup 2026 is expected to bring together more than 3,000 competitors, researchers, students, and professionals from dozens of countries, as well as 15,000 visitors interested in robotics, to South Korea. Since 1997, the competition has brought together leading universities, research institutions, and emerging talent, challenging teams to design and program autonomous robots capable of performing complex tasks inspired by real-world scenarios.
Professor Pedro Lima explained that “this year’s qualification process was more competitive than usual, as the RoboCup@Home category merged its three sub-leagues into a single Open Platform League. Despite this, the SocRob@Home team, based on the TIAGo robot platform, qualified in the first round. A second team, LisTex, a joint entry with the University of Texas at Austin under the UTAustin–Portugal program, secured qualification in the second round.”
LisTex competes under the FOMO-HODOR project, which investigates the use of multimodal large language models for robotic task planning and execution. The team will also introduce a humanoid robot, the BOOSTER T1 known as Lola, to the @Home league for the first time.
Members of the SocRob@Home project will be distributed across both teams. The SocRob team has its roots in earlier EU-funded research at ISR-Lisboa, including the MOnarCH and RoCKIn projects, and it focuses on scientific topics such as perception, human-robot interaction, decision-making under uncertainty, and manipulation.
