In June 2017, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) put on the first Agile Robotics for Industrial Applications Competition (ARIAC). The goal of the competition was to test the agility of industrial robot systems, with the goal of enabling industrial robots on the shop floors to be more productive, more autonomous, and to require less time from shop floor workers. For the last five years of the competition, we introduced a cash prize to motivate and expand participation. This is the seventh year of the competition.
In this context, agility is defined broadly to address:
- Failure identification and recovery, where robots can detect failures in a manufacturing process and automatically recover from those failures
- Automated planning, to minimize (or eliminate) the up-front robot programming time when a new task is introduced
- Fixtureless environment, where robots can sense the environment and perform tasks on parts that are not in predefined locations
The competition Participants are required to develop a robot control system (software) to control a robot in a simulated environment. Gazebo (gazebosim.com), which is an open-source robotics simulation environment, will be used as the testing platform and the Robot Operating Systems (ROS), which is an open-source set of software libraries and tools, will be used to define the interfaces to the simulation system.
Software interfaces will be made publicly available that will allow the Participants to control the robot. The qualifier will begin in the April 2023 timeframe with the final competition occurring in mid-May 2023. The competition will be performed virtually, so physical attendance is not required to compete.
Awards:- $17,500
Deadline:- 26-05-2023
