The ICRA Robot Challenge

First Announcement of Events

We are proud to announce the creation of a new event associated with the ICRA conference: The ICRA Robot Challenge. The challenge seeks to provide a forum for robotics practitioners to demonstrate their research on a set of difficult problems that are of interest to the community at large. The challenge also seeks to serve as a forum by which new collaborations can be forged between researchers where complementary technologies can be merged to create more robust and complete solutions.

This first robotic challenge event will take place at ICRA 2008 in Pasadena, California (USA). The general theme for this year's challenge will be space robotics. The planned events include:

Event 1: Remote Exploration

This event simulates a planetary exploration mission, where there is no human presence. Robots must navigate autonomously, optionally with high-level guidance from human operators, exploring unknown terrain, and fulfilling a science goal. The goal of the event is to show advances on the current state-of-the-art, as demonstrated by the MER rovers.

Event 2: Astronaut Assistant

This event simulates a planetary mission where robots and human astronauts must collaborate on some task. Robots must interact with the human mission specialists to accomplish some exploration and sample-recovery task.