Competitions Bring Robotics Solutions to Life
NEWS, Community, Robotics |
Identify and develop transferable skills in robotics: This is one of the goals of the euROBIN project. The network of 32 partners composed of universities and companies seeks to capitalize on the revolution in machine learning and artificial intelligence and package skills that can be deployed across the varied robot platforms among its members. „A new generation of cognitive and adaptive multi-purpose machines is within reach. These robots will differ from previous ones in their ability to learn and share information about their environment. By fostering synergy between academic institutions, industry leaders, and policymakers, euROBIN aims to address global challenges with cutting-edge robotics and Artificial Intelligence solutions", euROBIN writes on his website.
Competing in an International Community
Competition between researchers drives forward progress but also creates information silos and discourages collaboration. The euROBIN explores an alternative event format where participants are rewarded for producing reusable hardware and software modules to collectively solve a challenge. During a project annual meeting directly following the 2024 Humanoids conference in Nancy, France, the euROBIN project organized a first-of-its-kind, collaborative competition or “Coopetition” with three leagues for outdoor, home, and industrial robots. Teams prepared robotic solutions to autonomously navigate an obstacle course for parcel delivery, seek out and organize items in a mock-up kitchen, and perform an industrial electrical inspection task for each respective league challenge. 15 project partners brought their robot platforms and teams together to spend a week sharing their methods, challenges, and lessons learned with one another. Each participant earned points for producing modules in a competition repository collection and point multipliers for integrating modules from other teams when completing their individual challenges.
Real-World Robotics with Transferable Applications to Industry
“Our Coopetition challenge stood out as a hallmark of the euROBIN Week. The invited teams not only came together to share methods with each other but also with hundreds of school children who visited the venue during the week to inspire future roboticists“, says Peter So, a researcher at the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and organizer of the industrial league for the „Coopetition“ in Nancy. "The final demonstrations and shared repository of robot skills represent multiple examples of cutting edge advancements in real-world robotics with transferable applications to several industry use cases." The roboticist shares insights from a decade of robot system integration experience and has previously organized the international Robothon Grand Challenge competition at the Automatica trade show in Munich since 2021. Ultimately, each event aims to “challenge the robotics community to develop versatile, re-usable robotic skills and our competition task boards provide a common demonstrator and benchmarking platform to regularly and automatically assess developments in the automation of manual tasks used in the processing of electronic waste to promote the circular economy”, So is convinced.
Two Successful Competitions in 2024: euROBIN Manipulation Skill Versatility Challenge at IROS in Abu Dhabi and the Humanoids-euROBIN Week Coopetition in Nancy, France
Last year, Peter organized two high-profile robotics competitions at prominent conferences IROS and Humanoids. “The goal of these events is to bring leaders and rising stars in robot manipulation together to benchmark methods in automation skills and share knowledge across the globe,” explains Peter So, “our collective goal is to demonstrate the state-of-the-art in robot manipulation skills, identify interesting areas of research, and measure the performance gap between robots and humans. In organizing competition events, we have shown they are an effective way to engage the public, robotics community, and all stakeholders across academia and industry to showcase real-world robotics.“
Next Events in 2025: ERF 2025 and Automatica
ERF 2025:
In 2025, Peter will organize a workshop on benchmarking robot performance at the European Robotics Forum in Stuttgart and unveil the next Robothon Grand Challenge competition at the Automatica in Munich.
Visit the Forum website.
Automatica:
Robothon Competition: Researchers who intend to participate in the next Robothon at the Automatica can apply soon.