Robot competitions have proved to be an effective instrument to foster scientific research and push the state of the art in a field. The goal of RoCKIn is to speed up the progress towards smarter robots through scientific competitions. Two challenges have been selected for the competitions due to their high relevance and impact on Europe’s societal and industrial needs: domestic service robots (RoCKIn@Home) and innovative robot applications in industry (RoCKIn@Work). Both challenges have been inspired by activities in the RoboCup community, but RoCKIn improves and extends them by introducing new and prevailing research topics, like natural interaction with humans or networking mobile robots with sensors in ambient environments, in addition to specifying concrete benchmark criteria for assessing progress.