LEIPZIG, Germany In the 20 years since its debut as a festival for competitive robot geeks, RoboCup has grown into an event that attracts serious interest from around the world, with large companies entering machines meant to showcase their technological prowess.

This year's event took place in Leipzig, Germany, from June 30 to July 4, with about 3,500 researchers and students attending.

Toyota Motor's human-support robot greeted the crowd on July 1 at Leipziger Messe, the venue for the contest. The HSR is designed to care for the elderly and physically disabled. Operated by verbal command or tablet, the machine can use its 60cm arm to push, pull, pick up objects and perform other tasks.

HSR is one entry in a field with enormous potential: personal care robots. The RoboCup Federation recently decided to introduce a new series of events in which developers compete using standard platforms to perform household tasks. The competition will premiere at the next year's RoboCup, in Nagoya, central Japan.

Toyota introduced the HSR in a special presentation at this year's event to select standard hardware for the new competition. In this part of the event, six teams, including SoftBank Group and an Italian research organization, in addition to Toyota, showed off their entries.

The first RoboCup was held in 1997 in Nagoya and organized by a group led by Hiroaki Kitano, president and CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories. Kitano is well known in robotics circles for his role in creating Sony's popular robotic dog, Aibo. The event was initially aimed at academics -- a place where advanced robotics technologies could be tested in the form of a soccer match. The first RoboCup, which drew around 100 researchers, was something of a "festival of geeks," according to one insider.

In recent years, however, it has become more like an international trade show for the robotics industry. Indeed, the theme for the 20th edition was the industrialization of robotics. "About 25% of the venue area is used by businesses to showcase their technology and recruit staff," Kitano said.

DRAMATIC PROGRESS The transformation of the event owes a lot to the dramatic progress in robotics. Gone are the days when developers competed in operability and dexterity, for example, or to see how quickly and precisely robots could respond to human commands. Researchers now focus mainly on big data and artificial intelligence.

Today's cutting-edge robots instantly crunch huge amounts of data from a variety of sensors. Instead of being connected to an input device, such as a controller, robots are connected to cloud servers on the internet. The devices understand and obey human commands.

Researchers are increasingly required to work with companies to come up with ideas for new businesses, even as they are still ironing out the kinks in their machines.

RoboCup organizers want to deepen ties between researchers and companies, and they want industry to help bring useful technologies to market. That is why they asked Toyota Motor and other developers to bring their mechanical home helpers to this year's event.

HSR and SoftBank's Pepper humanoid robot were chosen as the two platforms to be used in the household robot competition next year. The RoboCup Federation selected the two robots for their compact size, and with the expectation that the two companies will continue to produce and maintain them, according to RoboCup insiders.

Toyota's hopes to sell about 1,000 its HSR devices by 2020. Akifumi Tamaoki, general manager of Toyota's partner robot division, said it is important for the company to get outside assistance. "There's only so much we can do just with our research alone," Tamaoki said. "We want input from people around the world to raise the level of sophistication" of the robots.