Robothon® is an international competition and benchmarking event for measuring state-of-the-art performance in robot manipulation. The second edition of the Robothon® took place digitally from April 29 to May 29, 2022, and brought new challenges for its competitors. A coin battery removal task was added to the internet-connected task board. Teams were asked to present a flexible solution where the jury could specify a new task completion order. In addition, they had to present a Bring-Your-Own-Device disassembly demo using a locally sourced e-waste device, a task that proved that Robothon® manipulation tasks are transferable to various waste devices around the world.
The award ceremony as well as the Robothon®’s Impact Round Table were live-streamed from the i_space of the AI.Society exhibition area of munich_i at the automatica fair in Messe München on June 21, 2022 and are available online. The Robothon® was sponsored by Huawei, Siemens, and Conrad and organized by automatica, Messe München, and the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) of the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
The winners of the Robothon® Grand Challenge 2022 are:
- First Place: Team CARI (Italy) – 10,000€ sponsored by Huawei
- Second Place: Team Singularitas (Slovenia) – 4,000€ sponsored by Siemens
- Third Place: Team RoboTechX MDX (United Arab Emirates) – 2,000€ sponsored by Siemens
- Honorable Mention: Team RoboPig (Germany) & Team MMR UAS Technikum Vienna (Austria) – 1,000€ each sponsored by Siemens
The Robothon® 2022 put the spotlight on several talented teams across the globe. In the words of Peter So, technical leader of the competition, “I am incredibly grateful and amazed to see the Robothon® Grand Challenge double in both size and performance from our first year at automatica sprint 2021. 20 international teams from 13 countries came together online to develop autonomous robotic skills for the disassembly and sorting of electronic waste. Our first competition set out to benchmark manipulation performance between humans and robots and found a gap of 100 seconds with the fastest robot team clocking in at 110 seconds to complete 5 different tasks on our competition task board. This year in 2022, we added a sixth task, coin battery removal, the fastest robot finished in 31 seconds! Thank you to our sponsors Huawei, Siemens, and Conrad as well as the partnership with Messe München which allowed our teams to celebrate together in Munich at the Automatica trade show.”