Autonomous Robots & Teams

Team Hector's award-winning intelligent “search and rescue robots” autonomously explore unknown environments in disaster zones to improve situational awareness. In doing so, they can take over tasks in “emergency teams” in insecure environments for more effective and safe mission execution DRZ.

However, the resilience of cities can also be enhanced by deploying multiple (semi-)autonomous robotic systems in crises EmergenCITY.

The capabilities of robots with autonomy capabilities complementary to humans can also support humans in tiring and dangerous tasks (e.g. “inspection and surveillance”) and thus increase the digitalization and efficiency of overall processes AICO.

Energy Robotics is a highly successful high-tech spinoff of SIM Group and a pioneer in providing autonomous robotic inspections for capital-intensive, industrial infrastructure.

Team Hector started in 2009 as an interdisciplinary effort of researchers from TU Darmstadt's Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering Departments within the PhD program GRK 1362. Its current team members are PhD students from Computer Science and students of the master programs in Autonomous Systems, Computer Science, Computational Engineering and Information Systems Technology.

The team name Hector stands for Heterogeneous Cooperating Team Of Robots. The team's mission is to research and develop heterogeneous search and rescue robots cooperating with each other and a remote human supervisor to achieve a common mission. After several years of successful research and development in mobile ground and aerial search and rescue robotics, Team Hector very recently started to research and develop advanced legged locomotion and manipulation abilities for humanoid disaster response robots.

Team ViGIR (Virginia-Germany Interdisciplinary Robotics), as been a
collaborative research and development effort advancing robotics for disaster response participating 2012-25 in the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

SIM members have been responsible for the robotics software architectureand most of the functional components.

The final report of this project is available online.

Most of the developments have been published as open source at Github.

Team ViGIRr – Facebook

Team ARGONAUTS has been an Austrian-German team participating in TOTAL's international ARGOS Challenge for the first autonomous inspection robot on gas and oil sites from 2013.

Team ARGONAUTS won the ARGOS Challenge.

Its team for the finals has been formed by taurob GmbH from Vienna, Austria, taurob.com, and the SIM Group of Technische Universität Darmstadt.

While taurob provided an ATEX certified robot demonstrator, SIM team members were providing all relevant parts of the software (autonomous robot capabilities, communication, user interface).

Team Argonauts – Facebook

Our team of autonomous, soccer playing humanoid robots was established in 2004 as a sibling team of the successful four-legged robot team Darmstadt Dribbling Dackels The Dribblers have become one of the most successful teams of the RoboCup Humanoid League.

Please note that since 2013 Darmstadt Dribblers are taking a break and are currently not active anymore.