IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2023 - 154

COM P E TITI ON S
Taking the First Step Toward
Autonomous Quadruped Robots
The Quadruped Robot Challenge at ICRA 2023 in London
By Adam Jacoff, Jeongmin Jeon, Oliver Huke, Dimitrios Kanoulas, Seehoon Ha,
Donghyun Kim, and Hyungpil Moon
Last year, the IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society (RAS) CAB Competition
Committee proposed the Quadruped
Robot Challenge (QRC) as an exemplary
robot challenge organized by RAS at
RAS's major conferences. As a part of
the project, the first version of the QRC
was held in ICRA 2023 in London. In
this column, we would like to introduce
the challenges and the results.
Due to the late approval of funding to
support the QRC, the announcement of
the competition was made in late January
2023, only four months prior to the
event in London. Between the approval of
funding by the RAS AdCom and the call
for participants for the QRC, the organizing
committee invited local organizers
(Figure 1) and prepared the competition
rules. It also developed a simulation environment
and provided a list of purchasing
items for teams to set up their experimental
setups and practice in their local
areas. (The resources can be found at the
QRC homepage: https://quadruped-robot
-challenges.notion.site/ICRA-2023-Quad
ruped-Robot-Challenges.)
The original plan was to have two
separate events: one for autonomous
robots and another for remote control
robots. Achieving autonomy requires
integrating quadruped robot motion
control, mapping, and localization technologies,
which many research teams
around the world have not successfully
demonstrated in challenging environments
like ours. On the other hand,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2023.3293296
Date of current version: 11 September 2023
154
FIGURE 1. The organizers and sponsor.
IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2023
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remote control is technologically less
complex but more practical for field
operations. Therefore, the QRC organizing
committee decided to host two
separate challenges, one for autonomous
robots and the other for remote control
robots, at ICRA 2023 in London. To
account for the advantages larger robots
have in overcoming ground obstacles,
each challenge was divided into two categories
based on the size of the robots.
In the month leading up to the event,
nine teams registered for the remote
control category, and six teams registered
for the autonomous category.
All of the teams planned to use smaller
robots, with most of them using commercial
products, such as AlienGo or Go1
from Unitree, and one team using a custom-made
small-sized robot. This allowed
the local organizers to simplify the design
of the competition arena to accommodate
only the smaller track.
In late April, the ICRA 2023 organizers
finalized the location of the competition
event, and the local organizers had an
opportunity to discuss the issue of organizing
the QRC at the London Excel venue.
Since the competition arena was simplified
for smaller robots, the organizers decided

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1091-0716 https://quadruped-robot-challenges.notion.site/ICRA-2023-Quadruped-Robot-Challenges https://quadruped-robot-challenges.notion.site/ICRA-2023-Quadruped-Robot-Challenges https://quadruped-robot-challenges.notion.site/ICRA-2023-Quadruped-Robot-Challenges

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2023

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