The ICRA Robot Challenge

Participation

Planetary exploration through intelligent mobile robots is a fascinating endeavor. The tremendous success of the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit
and Opportunity already shows the potential of this field where nevertheless many open problems remain. First of all, there are a large variety of different planetary environments and possible missions that are of scientific interest. Accordingly, various locomotion and manipulation challenges exist for planetary exploration robots. Second, communication delays or even dropouts make standard teleoperation very challenging. Intelligent autonomous functions are hence of tremendous interest to facilitate robot control.

The event consists of different mission components that reflect these open problems. A description of the challenges planned for this event can be found below. Teams interested in participation are welcome to make suggestions for the mission components. The event is intended as a demonstration of state of the art research relevant to planetary exploration, especially in form of robot designs and intelligent autonomous functions.

Teams interested in participating should send an email with subject “Planetary Exploration Challenge, ICRA 2009” to Andreas Birk ( a.birk @
jacobs-university.de ) by 28. February 2009 with following information:

• Team Name
• Affiliation
• Team Leader
• Email
• Team size (number of team members)

The Environment

The environment for this event is an outdoor area approximately 10m by 10m, covered in gravel to a depth of 10cm. Details of the composition of the surface are still being worked out, and will be posted here when they are finalized. Rocks of varying sizes and compositions will be placed on the surface. A simulated lander will be at one end, with one or more ramps extending down to the surface. Robots will ideally start and end all missions on the lander platform. The ramps will be clearly marked with brightly-colored tape, and at least one of them will be free of obstacles. The surface will be smoothed between runs, removing all traces of previous robots.

The Event Elements

This event simulates the exploration of a small area of a planetary surface. There are a number of sub-challenges in the event, and teams should feel free to attempt as many or as few of these as they want. This event is intended to showcase autonomous systems that operate with a minimum of human intervention. We are more interested in demonstrating the state-of-the-art in robots that can explore natural terrain rather than in having a traditional competition. If you have a robot that does something that does not fit into the categories below, but still want to participate, email us and let us know. We will be happy to work with you to come up with a way for you to participate and to show off your system's capabilities.

Onto the surface.

The robot must leave the lander platform, and make it onto the planetary surface. The robot must identify the ramps off of the platform, orient itself appropriately, and navigate down one of the ramps to the surface. The ramps might be obstructed by deflated "air bags", or might not have deployed properly. The system should recognize and deal with these situations appropriately. The operation will be considered successful if the robot manages to get two meters (measured at the closest point) away from the lander.

The lander platform will be constructed to autonomously open (perhaps with some human intervention), and to include potential obstacles on the ramps. The event might also be set up to include obstacles at the bottom of the ramps that are either impassible, or must be navigated around.

Data collection.

The robot must autonomously navigate to a remote science station, at the other side of the planetary surface to collect a set of recorded science data, and then return to the lander. The science station and robot are only equipped with short range (simulated) communications, so the robot must be physically close to the science station or lander in order to transfer data. The robot will be given the location of the science station, in some coordinate frame, but will not be given a map of the environment. The goal is to retrieve the data and bring it back to the lander as quickly as possible.

Map the Environment.

The robot should build an accurate metric map of the environment in a fixed time period. The time period starts when the robot leaves the lander ramp, and the map must be built by the end of the time period. Building a map in the sandbox will be particularly difficult, since there will be a lot of wheel slip, and the surface is not planar. We will purposefully put rises and dips into the surface to make mapping challenging.

Extreme navigation.

Part of the planetary surface will contain a number of extremely challenging physical obstacles, and a near-vertical cliff-face. Robots must traverse these obstacles to reach the bottom of the cliff, climb the cliff to the top (if possible), and then return to the lander.

Find the robot.

A previous mission has gone wrong, and one of our robots is missing. The goal is to find this robot, possibly following it's tracks in the surface material, and to bring it back to the lander. For robots that are incapable of picking up another robot, finding the other robot and touching it will be enough. To add difficulty to this problem, the lost robot can be made small, so that the finding robot cannot just follow the tracks (through narrow spaces), but must plan paths around obstacles, and find the trail again.

Bring back shiny things.

The robot must go out and find interesting objects, and bring them back to the lander. These objects could be unusual rocks, differently colored sand or gravel, alien plants, or man-made artifacts. We could even have the robot look for liquid water or buried treasure.

Back on the lander.

At the end of the mission, the robot must return to the lander platform.