Universitat Jaume I students Pau Montagut Bofi and Mario García Blasco, from the Bachelor's Degree in Robotic Intelligence, have won first place in the international competition of the workshop From Data to Decisions: VLA Pipelines for Real Robots, a specialised event held within the framework of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2026), the world's largest robotics conference, which took place in Vienna from 1 to 5 June.
The workshop focused on bringing the latest artificial intelligence models to real physical robots rather than limiting them to computer simulations. In the competition, the UJI students competed against 36 teams from universities and research centres around the world.
The challenge consisted of teaching the Toyota HSR robot, a platform designed by Toyota to assist older adults and people with reduced mobility in their daily lives, to perform household tasks. This type of challenge is known as an embodiment mismatch, meaning that a model has been trained for one type of robot but is expected to operate on a completely different one. In addition, the HSR robot is particularly difficult to control, as it combines eleven movable components that the software must coordinate simultaneously. To address this challenge, the UJI team selected and compared two different artificial intelligence models and took part in several official evaluation rounds carried out on the physical robot.
The students developed the project during an Erasmus+ Traineeship mobility period in Vienna at the Vision for Robotics (V4R) laboratory of the Technische Universität Wien, one of Europe's leading research groups in computer vision applied to service robots. Their achievement is particularly noteworthy given that, as final-year undergraduate students, they competed against teams composed mainly of specialised research personnel.
The paper resulting from this work, Per-Group Error, Not Total MSE: Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models for 11-DoF Mobile Manipulation, co-authored with doctoral researcher Tessa Pulli and Professor Markus Vincze, both from V4R, was also accepted as a poster and received the Best Poster Award at the first Toyota Global HR Forum, organised by Toyota Motor Corporation as part of ICRA 2026.