Events

in chronological order

The ICRA 2008 Robot Challenge

A new robot event is being introduced during 19-23 May at ICRA 2008 in Pasadena, California (USA). The event will consist of a number of specific challenges with the overall theme of "space robotics". The Challenge seeks to provide a forum for robotics practitioners to demonstrate their research on a set of difficult problems that are of interest to the community at large. The challenge also seeks to serve as a forum by which new collaborations can be forged between researchers where complementary technologies can be merged to create more robust and complete solutions.

Planned events include:

• Event 1: Remote Exploration. This event simulates a planetary exploration mission, where there is no human presence. Robots must navigate autonomously, optionally with high-level guidance from human operators, exploring unknown terrain, and fulfilling a science goal. The goal of the event is to show advances on the current state-of-the-art, as demonstrated by the MER rovers.
• Event 2: Astronaut Assistant. This event simulates a planetary mission where robots and human astronauts must collaborate on some task. Robots must interact with the human mission specialists to accomplish some exploration and sample-recovery task.

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EUROBOT 2008 will take place from 22 - 24 May in Heidelberg, Germany. The theme this year is "Mission to Mars". First Lego League, RoboCup, Elrob, and Darpa Grand Challenge demonstrations will enrich the program. Also ESA and DLR activities will be demonstrated.
EUROBOT 2008 is co-organised with the EUROBOT Conference.

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The 2008 Semantic Robot Vision Challenge (SRVC) will be held on June 23-28 in Anchorage, Alaska. SRVC is a research competition that is designed to push the state of the art in image understanding and automatic acquisition of knowledge from large unstructured databases of images (such as those generally found on the web).

In this competition, fully autonomous robots receive a text list of objects that they are to find. They use the web to automatically find image examples of those objects in order to learn visual models. These visual models are then used to identify the objects in the robot's cameras. We encourage anyone in these research fields to participate and help us to advance the state of the art in image understanding research. At the end of the competition, we will hold a workshop so that the specific technical aspects of each entry can be presented and discussed.

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M-ELROB 2008, the 3rd Military European Land-Robot Trial will take place from 30 June - 03 July 2008 in Hammelburg, Germany. The purpose of the trial is to identify robotic systems, which have the capabilities to master daily defence and security tasks. Featured scenarios this time:

1. Reconnaissance and surveillance
2. Camp security
3. Transport
4. Mule
5. EOD

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DGA (France) and DSTL (UK) announce the 3rd Annual Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge Europe (SAUC-E). This will take place from July 7-11 2008, in Brest, France.

SAUC-E has been designed to advance Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) technology. It is hoped this will be achieved by challenging the next generation of engineers and scientists to design and build an AUV and then perform realistic missions in the underwater environment. The competition will encourage young engineers and scientists to think about underwater technology and its future possibilities, as well as fostering ties between the students and the organisations involved in AUV technologies.

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RoboCup@Home will take place from July 14-20 in Suzhou, China. RoboCup@Home is a league inside the RoboCup competitions that focuses on real-world applications and human-machine interaction with autonomous mobile robots. The aim is to foster the development of useful robotic applications that can assist humans in everyday life. It is the major home robotics competition worldwide. The registration deadline has now passed.

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The UAV Challenge Outback Rescue 2008 will take place in Kingaroy, Queensland, Australia, from 23-25 September.

Challenge: Outback rescue mission — find and assist "Outback Joe", a lost bush walker in Australia's vast outback and deliver emergency supplies within an hour using UAVs. The winner gets &dollars 50,000 in prize money.

The event was conceived to promote the development of Unmanned Airborne Vehicle (UAV) technologies and their use for civil applications. These civil applications can include crop management, traffic control, wildlife surveillance, stock monitoring, and environmental monitoring.