ICRA '07
2007 IEEE International Conference
on Robotics and Automation

The ICRA 2008 Robot Competition

A Half Day Workshop
Tuesday, April 10, Afternoon

  News  
  Abstract  
  Competition  
  Contributions  
  Submissions  
  Dates  
  Program  
  Organizers  
      

News

ICRA 2007 meetings a huge success
The two meetings at ICRA 2007 in Rome were a great success, with a very active debate about how to structure the 2008 competition, and how to make the event sustainable over the long term. If you're interested in catching up on the details of the discussions, you can subscribe to the competition discussion mailing list. [29 April, 2007]
Second meeting at ICRA
A number of people have expressed an interest in the 2008 competition, but are not able to attend the workshop because of scheduling conflicts. To try and get as much feedback as possible, we will have a second meeting at ICRA, on Friday, April 13, at 16:30 in Angelicum room 4B. If you're interested in attending this meeting, drop us a note, so we have a rough idea of numbers. [2 April, 2007]

Abstract

A new robot competition is being introduced at ICRA 2008. This half-day workshop has three main goals:
  1. To present the draft technical and organizational details for the 2008 competition.
  2. To gather feedback and suggestions from the community on the direction of the competition. We are very interested in having the elements of the competition be representative of all of the technical areas represented at ICRA, and welcome any and all input.
  3. To allow potential competitors to meet, describe their research interests and capabilities, and to begin to form multi-disciplinary, multi-institution teams.

The primary goal of the workshop is to announce the new competition to a wide audience of ICRA attendees, and to give a detailed, technical description of the individual events, and to gather feedback and suggestions from the community. We hope that the workshop will be highly interactive, and a significant time will be allocated to discussion of the events. An important secondary goal is to allow potential competitors to meet each other, and discuss relevant aspects of their respective research programs. Robotics is inherently a multi-disciplinary field, and we will actively be encouraging cross-institution collaborative entries to the competition. The proposed workshop will provide a structured environment in which potential collaborators can meet, and form plans for a competition entry.

Interested participants are invited to submit a four-page research statement. These statements will be compiled and distributed at the workshop, along with a comprehensive description of the competition itself. Participants will also be invited to prepare a poster for the informal poster session, and will be given an opportunity to make a short presentation advertising their work and their poster. These presentations will likely be limited to two or three slides, and will follow the format of the highly successful "Fast Forward" preview session held at the annual ACM SIGGRAPH conference.

The ICRA 2008 Competition

The details of the competition are still under discussion, and will be posted here as they become available. The competition will have the theme "space robotics" and will consist of two events. One will be based on a remote (robot only) exploration scenario. The other will be based on a collaborative scenario, where humans and robots work together on an exploration task. We will present the current version of both of these events at the workshop.

The competition events will be designed to be inclusive of all disciplines traditionally represented at ICRA. We will especially encourage multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional teams, and teams that wish to participate on only a part of an event.

We expect to post more details here soon. To be notified of updates to this page, send email to the organizers.

Call for Contributions

We invite short research statements from teams interested in competing in the ICRA 2008 Robot Competition, or individuals who are interested in the organization of such an event. The papers should describe the team's areas of interest and expertise, summarize previous significant results, and identify specific areas in which they are interested in collaborating (in the context of the Competition). We will collect these position papers and distribute them at the workshop to facilitate the formation of multi-disciplinary, multi-institution teams. We will also make these papers available on the ICRA 2008 Competition web page, to further facilitate the formation of multi-disciplinary teams.

A more complete call for contributions is available here.

Submission Information

Submissions in PDF format should be emailed to Bill Smart at wds (at) cse (dot) wustl (dot) edu listed below. Papers are limited to four pages in ICRA 2007 format. We will notify authors of acceptance, and give full details of the oral and poster presentations by March 14.

Submitters should note that submissions will not appear in the officially-produced ICRA CD proceedings, due to the late submission deadline. Papers will be distributed at the workshop, and on the web.

Important Dates

Submissions due:      March 1, 2007
Author notification:      March 14, 2007
Workshop: April 10, 2007

Tentative Workshop Program

Time      Item      Who
14:00 - 14:10 Welcome Smart and Rybski
14:10 - 14:25 The Competition and ICRA 2008 Gaurav Sukhatme, ICRA 2008 Program Chair
14:25 - 14:50 The RoboCup@Space Competition Pedro Lima
14:50 - 15:20 Event details Smart and Rybski
15:20 - 15:50 Short Presentations Participants
15:50 - 16:10 Coffee Break Participants
16:10 - 18:00 Discussion Participants

Workshop Organizers

Bill Smart
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Washington University in St. Louis
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130
United States
Phone: +1 (314) 935-4749
Fax: +1 (314) 935-7302
Email: wds (at) cse (dot) wustl (dot) edu
          Paul Rybski
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
United States
Phone: +1 (412) 268-7417
Fax: +1 (412) 268-5571
Email: prybski (at) cs (dot) cmu (dot) edu