Competitions

Robotics competitions serve as an excellent platform for benchmarking the independent efforts of teams across the world in common challenge scenarios, promote discussions and exchange of knowledge, enrich research by offering new challenges, and motivate researchers and practitioners to push boundaries. The spectacle and excitement provided by competitions also help draw the interest of new and budding researchers.

This year, IEEE ICRA 2023 will host 12 exciting robotics competitions in areas including humanoid robots, mobile robots, legged robots, robot manipulation and grasping, and forays into important emerging topics such as robot ethics. These competitions cover a significant breadth and range of expertise offering opportunities for most robotics researchers to participate. Check out the details of the individual competitions and get in touch with the competition organisers to register your interest. We also welcome everyone joining ICRA 2023 to visit the Competitions Hall and witness the events during the conference

Comp Programme

Roboethics to design and development competition

Dates: Tuesday 30th May - Friday 2nd June

About the Competition

The world needs robots that behave well in social situations! Can you help design robots to navigate ethically sensitive situations? For instance, if a visitor requests a robot to fetch the homeowner’s credit card, how would you design the robot to react? What if a patient with diabetes asks for chocolate cake in a hospital? Should a robot comply? The Roboethics Competition challenges students and researchers to identify ethically challenging situations and design robots that can navigate these tricky situations.

Join the 2023 ICRA Roboethics Competition to contribute to the frontier of advancing the discussion of embedding ethics into robot design. Our aim is to enable people from different disciplinary backgrounds to join the challenge. We encourage you to team up with people from different technical and academic backgrounds for this competition.

This competition is composed of two challenges. The first one is the ‘Ethical Design Challenge,’ in which teams will develop and submit design proposals on how to identify and address ethical issues in a given scenario. In order to foster as much interdisciplinary participation as possible, this stage of the competition is a paper design, that is, no coding hardware design is required. The second challenge is an ‘Implementation Challenge’ that will take place at ICRA 2023, where design proposals from the first challenge will be implemented in the Roboethics Simulation Platform (details provided on the full competition website). The platform offers easy-to-program features that abstract the functional robotic challenges (e.g., object recognition, navigation). You do not need to participate in both challenges. In orther words, participants can choose to participate in either one or both of the challenges. Again, our aim is to enable people from different disciplinary backgrounds to join the challenge.

This competition will challenge you to think about ethics as a set of concrete design considerations that can be implemented as interactive robot behaviours.

We look forward to seeing your submissions!

Click here for Competition Website

Click here for Competition Registration

Competition Key Dates :

Ethical Design Challenge: Online submission due May, 19th, Friday (AoE) ; Submission methods TBD

Implementation Challenge: TBD

Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competitions

Dates: Tuesday 30th May - Friday 2nd June

About the Competition

The 7th Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition (RGMC) at ICRA2023 consists of two tracks; “The Cloth Manipulation Track” and “The Manufacturing Track”. Each track focuses on research and industry related tasks that test a robot systems ability to grasp, manipulate, perceive, assemble and/or disassemble objects of interest. Teams compete for points based on their ability to complete the sub-tasks of the track. The goal of the competition is to push research to meet the needs of industry through the benchmarking of task performance.

The Cloth Manipulation and Perception Track tests a system capability in the perception and/or manipulation of textiles. Specifically, the track consists on unfolding and folding rectangular clothes from the Household Cloth Object set, which will be distributed to participants. The motivation of this competition is to identify and gather the community in cloth manipulation, so we look for an easy entry point where participants are able to participate if they are interested in perception, manipulation, or both.

The Manufacturing Track has two tasks: Assembly and Disassembly of a NIST Task Board (NTB) that contains threaded fasteners, pegs of various geometries, electrical connectors, wire connections and routing, and a flexible belt with a tensioner. A pre-competition design will be made available for selected teams to continue development of their systems leading up to the competition. A separate competition board with modified assembly positions (very similar to the pre-competition NTB), and new parts (identical to all parts used in practice), will be supplied prior to the scheduled competition run.

Click here for Competition Website

Click here for Competition Registration

Click here for Competition Key Dates