The ICRA Robot Challenge

Overview

  The Sandbox
  Robotic Contingency
  Human-Robot Interaction

Overview

This page gives the details of the three events in the ICRA Robot Challenge, to be held at ICRA 2008. The overall theme of the Challenge is "Space Robotics", and the events are inspired by this theme. The main goal of the Challenge, however, is to showcase current research being done in all of the disciplines represented at ICRA and, over the coming years, to benchmark the progress that we, as a field, are making on real, hard, relevant problems.

This version of the rules is preliminary, and is subject to change as we work with the conference venue to allocate space and time for them, and as we get feedback from you, the potential participant. Our primary goal for the Challenge is for it to showcase your current research. If you are potentially interested in bringing a robot and participating in the Challenge, but the events don't represent exactly what you work on, email the organizers and let them know. We are more than happy to discuss changes to the events to make them more accessible and relevant to the current work in the field. Large-scale requests ("I work on pool-cleaning robots. Can we have a pool-cleaning competition?") are unlikely to be met, but smaller-scale ones ("I work on rock-climbing robots. Can we have a real climbing wall as part of the event?") are potentially manageable, and we want to hear them.

Updates to the event descriptions, and all other relevant information about the Challenge, will be posted on the Challenge web site. The web site also contains links to discussion and announcement lists for the Challenge, which we encourage you to sign up for.

Expressing an Interest in Participating

If you are interested in participating, you should visit the participation page to find out all of the details of the procedure.

Although the details are not yet finalized, it is highly likely that prospective teams will be required to submit a short paper, outlining their technical approach. These papers will be reviewed by the technical committee of the Challenge, and invitations to participate issued. This process was used with great success for the inaugural Robocup@Space competition in 2007, and ensured the technical quality of the event.

Rules, Points, and Winning the Challenge

We have explicitly not mentioned how we're going to score the Challenge events in the descriptions. Our intent, for this year at least, is to encourage strong, technically-driven entries, but also to have a competitive event. There will, most likely, be a points-based scoring scheme for each event and also a panel of judges. Our long-term goal for the Challenge is to have it be a showcase of real research in the field, with some friendly competition. We will, of course, announce the judging criteria well in advance of the competition, so that everyone knows where they stand.

Having said that, we're looking for feedback from the community (you, in other words) on how best to judge the events. We definitely want to recognize the teams that perform well, and show creative, technically-sound solutions that make a contribution to the state-of-the-art in robotics. We want to discourage solutions that focus on getting points, at the expense of a good, general solution in the spirit of the rules. If you have any opinions on this, we'd love to hear them.

Funding

We are working hard to be able to provide travel funding for participants. We are keenly aware that, especially for competitors from overseas, the cost of bringing a robot to ICRA can be prohibitive. We will announce information about travel funding for the event on the web site as soon as it becomes available.

Related Events at ICRA

We are planning a workshop at ICRA, after the end the the Challenge. This will allow participants to discuss the technical details of their approaches, and to share stories of what worked well, and what did not. The workshop is also intended as a way for you to give your feedback about the Challenge, and affect the shape of future events.

The Sandbox

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.

Event details

The Planetary Robotic Contingency

This event simulates an unexpected problem occurring at a planetary habitat, where a robotic solution must be quickly developed and deployed, using only existing resources. The intent of this event is to develop versatile robotic systems and software that can be adapted quickly to address unexpected events. Since humans are present, a natural solution to realistic unexpected events would exploit human creativity and human-robot interaction.

The competition drives not only the development of versatile robotic hardware and on-board software, but also the design and development of programming and assembly tools capable of rapidly implementing a wide variety of capabilities. Since tele-operation is not precluded for this event, the development of effective user interfaces is another expected outcome.

Event details
Registration page

Human-Robot Interaction

This event is intended to showcase the latest research results in human-robot interaction. There is no particular theme for this event, but robots must either learn from their interactions with humans, or interact in some social context. We leave what the robots actually learn, and what the social context is up to you.

Event web page