IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2014 - 8

COMPETITIONS

News from the Robot
Challenge at ICRA 2014
By Dan O. Popa

Results from the 2014 MMC
The MMC requires that all robots entered in the competition must be no
bigger than 500 µm in their largest dimension and must be able to operate
without the direct connection of wires
(i.e., untethered operation). The competition consisted of two events structured
to test each microrobot's speed, agility,
control capabilities, and ability to manipulate small objects. This year's event
scoring was structured to encourage
microrobot sizes as small as possible
(i.e., more possible points for smallersized robots). In the autonomous mobility challenge, the microrobots were
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2014.2360618
Date of publication: 19 December 2014

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

Turn-Around Region

required to autonomously navigate a
planar maze along an arbitrary path
provided by the judges just ahead of the
team's competition run. Compared with
the previous year, there were dimensional/obstacle changes to the millimeter-size arena, and teams were required
to program their paths on the spot after

Starting Region

t the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2014, two
challenges were held at the
Hong Kong Convention Center on
31 May-2 June, coinciding with the first
two workshop days of the conference.
The Mobile Microrobot Challenge
(MMC) [1], a competition sponsored
by the National Institute of Standards
and Technology (part of the U.S.
Department of Commerce) and then by
IEEE Robotics and Automation Society
(RAS) Technical Committee on MicroNano Robotics, was successfully held
for the seventh time. Also, the Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technology Challenge [2], a competition
sponsored by the IEEE RAS Special
Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology, debuted in 2012.

being given three different paths with
equal total path lengths and an equal
number of direction changes, as shown
in Figure 1. The teams scored according
to the time the microrobots took to traverse the given paths, modified by a
robot dimensional bonus multiplier.
In the microassembly challenge, the
rules were unchanged from the previous year due to the level of difficulty,
and the microrobots were required to
assemble multiple microscale components inside a narrow channel. This task
simulates anticipated applications of
microassembly, including manipulation

Gate Sequence 2: 1-5-9-7-6-1;
Path Length: L2 = 14
(a)

(a)

(b)
Figure 1. (a) Dimensional requirements
for the arena and gates for the
autonomous microrobot challenge
and (b) a sample gate sequence that
the robots could be required to follow.
(Drawings courtesy of Igor Paprotny and
Dave Cappelleri [3].)

December 2014

(b)
Figure 2. (a) The students from the
University of Waterloo teleoperating
their microrobot during the assembly
challenge. (b) The MMC 2014 participants
during the poster session on 2 June 2014.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2014