The Robotics Competition at the ETH Zurich tasked 48 participants from eight international teams to locate five “artifacts” in an outdoor area approximately 20 x 20 meters in size. The teams were provided with a mobile robot equipped with four wheels, a camera, and a LiDAR sensor. To make this "SuperMegaBot" intelligent, the students programmed autonomous software to help it navigate the space. The Robosapiens team, led by TUM researcher Oliver Hausdörfer, utilized YOLOv5 for object detection, TARE-Planner for exploration, Open3D SLAM, and Graph-MSF for state estimation.

"We explored the entire environment, created a very accurate map, and successfully identified three objects," explained Hausdörfer. "The Summer School was a fantastic experience, as it allowed us to test algorithms on a real robot and experience the challenges of real-world robotics—a great complement to my doctoral studies."

In addition to the competition, the Summer School featured lectures on various topics in robotics and a symposium showcasing other robots in the search-and-rescue field. The Summer School is organized by the Robotics System Lab at ETH, the RobotX Initiative, and the ARCHE Initiative.