The University of Miami (UM) and Florida International University (FIU) formed the RoboCanes-VISAGE team to participate in the DSPL within the RoboCup@Home community.

UM's RoboCanes team has been active since 2010 in two other leagues as well: Soccer SPL and Soccer 3D Simulation. Dr. Ubbo Visser, who leads the RoboCanes team, has been active in the RoboCup community since 2000.

The VISAGE (Affective Social Computing Laboratory) lab from FIU creates engaging, socially intelligent agents that can interact with humans in innovative ways through expressive multi-modal interaction. The team is lead by Dr. Christine Lisetti who is one of the founders of the Affective Computing research field.

We propose to combine our strengths to conduct research on Toyota HSR to advance the state of the art in social human service robots, for which RoboCup@Home represents one of the best test bed environments. Our human-robotic interaction research involves topics in socially intelligent user interfaces and robotics. Our approach is to leverage latest progress in affective social computing and socially intelligent agents, and in AI robotics to address RoboCup@Home challenges.