IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2017 - 15

COMPETITIONS

The ICRA 2017 Robot Challenges
By Keng Peng Tee and Herman van der Kooij

he 2017 IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and
Automation (ICRA) robot
challenges aimed at advancing innovations in robotics through
solution benchmarking on challenging problems motivated by real-world
use scenarios. We tried to make the
challenges accessible to all members
of the robotics community so as to
encourage participation from around
the world and to ensure that the
challenges were closely relevant to the
technical scope of the conference.
Proposals for organizing robot challenges were solicited through open calls
as well as invitations to prospective
organizers from industry. For them,
running a robot challenge is a good
opportunity to work with world-class
teams in robotics to understand the gap
between state-of-the-art robotics technology and real-world needs and find
potential solutions to problems in a
short time frame.
Based on considerations of relevance, originality, feasibility, and the
implementation plan for the proposed
challenges, four robot challenges were
confirmed and held at ICRA 2017 on
30-31 May 2017:
● the Dà-Jiāng Innovations (DJI)
RoboMaster Mobile Manipulation
Challenge (RMMC)
● the 2017 Humanitarian Robotics and
Automation Technology Challenge (HRATC)
● the 2017 Mobile Microrobotics Challenge (MMC)
● the Soft Material Robot Challenge
(SMRC).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2017.2724339
Date of publication: 13 September 2017

Of these challenges, the HRATC
and MMC are familiar, having run
annually at ICRA since 2014 and 2010,
respectively. This year, the HRATC
introduced a new outdoor environment and a new robot platform with
low-cost sensors for autonomous
landmine detection, and the MMC
introduced a new microarena for the
autonomous navigation of microrobots. The RMMC is a new challenge
sponsored and organized by DJI, the
world's leading company in the civilian-drone industry. This industrysponsored and organized challenge
follows in the tradition of ICRA 2015,
with the Amazon Picking Challenge,
and ICRA 2016, with the Airbus
Shopfloor Challenge. Another new
addition is the SMRC, which is timely,
considering the growing interest and
excitement in the emerging area of
soft robotics.
All the robot challenges were successfully hosted, and the winners were
announced during the awards ceremony on 2 June 2017. Additional details
about the RMMC, MMC 2017, and
SMRC, including the objectives, descriptions, judging criteria, and winners, can be found in the following
sections. HRATC 2017 will be covered
in a separate piece on humanitarian
technology, which will appear in a
future issue. To summarize the results
of HRATC 2017, none of the finalists,
despite their valiant efforts, managed to
achieve the minimum requirements of
detecting more than 50% of the number of mines correctly to be declared a
winner. Details about the challenge
rules, difficulty level, and the teams'
performances will be shared in the
upcoming article.

The robot challenges chairs are
grateful to the IEEE Robotics and
Automation Society Competition
Committee for providing travel support to the finalist teams and the organizers. The support and cooperation
of the ICRA 2017 organizing committee and the challenge organizers are
also acknowledged and deeply appreciated. For more information about
each of the challenges, please visit
http://www.icra2017.org/conference/
robot-challenges.
The DJI RoboMaster Mobile
Manipulation Challenge
DJI initiated RoboMaster in 2015 as an
educational robotics competition for
students around the globe. The annual
competition attracted teams who competed in building ground robots that
used shooting mechanisms to battle
with other robots, and the performance
of the robots was monitored by a specially designed judging system. The
competition was designed not only to
entertain but also to draw more attention from the general public to robotics.
To encourage more participation in
shaping the future of robotics, RoboMaster 2017 included, as a special event,
the RMMC at the 2017 IEEE ICRA.
The RMMC was a ground robot
challenge that examined the application and competence of technologies
that include positioning, object grasping, force control, target identification,
and system stability. The teams were
challenged to develop a lightweight
mobile manipulator that could autonomously pick, transport, and stack
building blocks. The winners were
determined on the basis of completion
time and assembly height, and the

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