[meetings] [news] IROS 2024 Competition: The Earth Rover Challenge

[Xuesu Xiao]

Competition Website: https://sites.google.com/view/the-earth-rover-challenge/ 

Express-of-Interest Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfBN9W1FmIJpmAeR8PHERCt17THOg2fSzQz3Jm1-iGKNAnRrA/viewform 

Dear roboticists,

do you want to compete with human gamers and AI agents in an around-the-world real life Mario Kart game? Are you interested in training and deploying AI models for real-world robots, but don’t have (sufficient) robot platforms or data?

We are excited to bring to you The Earth Rover Challenge @ IROS 2024 – a first of its kind distributed robotics competition where human gamers and AI models will compete to solve real-world navigation challenges across the world, from Abu Dhabi to Vienna and Singapore to Nairobi! Competition participants will deploy their policies into realistic goal-oriented navigation scenarios, potentially without known maps. This competition will test the robustness, generalization, and safety of robot navigation models. 

Furthermore, we will standardize training data, robot hardware, and evaluation operations, so teams can entirely focus on model development and evaluation. Every participating team will be given 2 Earth Rover units for testing locally as well as up to 20 hours test time per week (in the coming months leading to the actual competition at IROS) with robots deployed remotely around the world (along with human operators who will follow closely behind the robots to provide real-time operational support to the participating teams).

We are excited to test your AI models as they navigate around the globe! 

Please fill out this form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfBN9W1FmIJpmAeR8PHERCt17THOg2fSzQz3Jm1-iGKNAnRrA/viewform) by Jun 30 AoE to express your interest in participating, and we will be in touch with more information.

More information about The Earth Rover Challenge: https://sites.google.com/view/the-earth-rover-challenge/, or email us at erc2024-o...@googlegroups.com.  

Organizing Team: FrodoBots, National University of Singapore, UC Berkeley, Google DeepMind, Georgia Tech, George Mason University

Thanks

Michael Cho, David Hsu, Dhruv Shah, Jie Tan, Joanne Truong, Ted Xiao, Xuesu Xiao, Naoki Yokoyama, Wenhao Yu, and Tingnan Zhang

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Xuesu Xiao, Ph.D.
--
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
George Mason University
xi...@gmu.edu
https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/