IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2018 - 119

COMPETITIONS

Aerial and Underwater
Robots in Competition
By Gabriele Ferri, Fausto Ferreira, Antidio Viguria, and Francisco Perez-Grau

he European Robotics League
(ERL) is a novel pan-European
competition format that aims to
provide a platform for developing, benchmarking, and showcasing
challenging robotics technologies,
bridging the gap between industry,
research, and the general public. It builds
on the success of important European
competitions and on several EU-FP7/
H2020 projects. The main goal is to
foster scientific progress and innovation
in robotics.
International teams, from both academia and industry, compete in three
leagues touching on different aspects of
robotics: consumer, professional, and
emergency service robots. These competitions target three main objectives:
meeting the European societal challenges of an aging population, strengthening
the European robotics service industry,
and assisting the effort to push state-ofthe-art features in autonomous systems
for emergency response. The league
season runs from April to February and
ends with an awards ceremony at the
European Robotics Forum. In addition
to the annual competitions, there is a
new biennial ERL Smart Cities challenge (also known as the SciRoc Challenge) that will be held in smart cities
across Europe. In this challenge, robots
from all three categories will come
together to interact with the smart
infrastructure in familiar urban settings.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2018.2873169
Date of publication: 12 December 2018

ERL Local Competitions:
Underwater and Aerial
Robots in Action
In addition to the major emergency
robot tournaments, several local tournaments are organized each year. In July
2018, the NATO Science and Technology Organization's Center for Maritime
Research and Experimentation hosted a
local tournament of the ERL Emergency Robots League in La Spezia, Italy. For
this competition, land and marine
robots were challenged with a simulated
incident in a harbor.
In February 2019, the Center for
Advanced Aerospace Technologies
(CATEC) will host a second local tournament in Seville, Spain, with aerial robots
from different teams, together with
mobile manipulators, competing to handle emergency situations. In such situations, robotic systems play a key role by
enabling rescue teams to sense and act at a
distance away from actual from emergency sites. The main goal of these challenges
is to push robotic developments toward
autonomous capabilities that can help rescue teams work safely and more efficiently. These capabilities include surveying the
disaster area quickly and providing map
representations of it or finding missing
persons and autonomously delivering
first-aid kits. But what are the main challenges that participants have faced, or will
face, in these two tournaments of the ERL
Emergency Robots League?
Emergency Robots League Local
Tournament 2018 (La Spezia, Italy)
The tournament was held during July
2018, with participants from various

organizations competing to solve a
simulated incident in a harbor. The
proposed tasks (for the marine segment of the competition) involved
autonomous navigation, piping-assembly inspection, recognition of underwater buoys, and identification of
underwater images/numbers.
Main Challenges Experienced
Participants faced challenges that went
beyond the merely technical. Managerial skills were, in fact, needed to organize the teamwork and handle robot
preparation under stress conditions
and within the
short available
time. These chal- The main goal is
lenges teach teams to foster scientific
the importance of
organization and progress and
division of roles, innovation in
along with how a
rational robot robotics.
design can be a
key point in addressing unavoidable technical issues.
Certainly, teams that participated
several times in the competition
showed significant improvements in
their performances.
Technological Gaps in
Underwater Manipulation
One important consideration in terms
of this local tournament was that no
robotic challenges involving underwater
manipulation were presented. The reason is that underwater manipulation,
from floating-based systems, remains a
premature technology for autonomous

december 2018

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

119

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2018