I'm looking for robotics competitions suitable for companies that desire show their innovations and gain visibility. I know about DARPA Robotics Challenge and RoboCup, but I'd love suggestions for global and European competitions across domains like industrial, medical, and space robotics. Any insights, including objectives, evaluation criteria, and dates, would be highly appreciated.
2 Answers
Here are some small competitions I know of. But the might be too small for companies, or mainly focused around students and companies might be forbidden.
Field Robot Event
The international Field Robot Event is an annual outdoor and online contest on a (virtual) agricultural field, where students and their supervisors compete within several tasks in autonomous navigation and other operations. The FRE has been founded by the Wageningen University in 2003 in order to motivate students to develop autonomous field robots. Now we are looking forward to the 20th event and hope to enjoy creative and functional solutions. The agricultural tasks will be challenging for the robots and their students, but behind engineering skills we want to promote meeting international colleagues ‐ and of course having fun during the contest!
Here the Website of Kamaro Engineering, which might be interesting. Some blog posts are in English as well.
Robotour
Robotour — robotika.cz outdoor delivery challenge, is originally Czech contest of autonomous robots navigating on paved park roads. Robots carrying payload (five liter barrel) get extra points. The contest is annual on falls. The first year was in 2006 in Prague, park Stromovka.
Carolo-Cup
The Carolo-Cup is a student competition, providing student teams with a platform for the design and implementation of automated RC cars. The main challenge is to implement cutting-edge algorithmic solutions for vehicle control and environment perception, based on a realistic application scenario. In the annual competition, the students will present their solutions to a jury from academia and industry, while competing with other international teams from different universities.
Some Teams: KITcar, Spatzenhirn
Formulastudent
Students build a single seated formula style car with which they can compete against teams from all over the world.
There is a driverless format as well.
Ariac
The ARIAC competition is imo. interesting, as it is an industrial setting:
https://ariac.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Virtual RobotX
The upcoming VRX competition is the virtual counterpart of the Maritime RobotX Challenge:
https://robotx.org/programs/vrx-2023/
https://robotx.org/programs/robotx-challenge-2022/
I think this is purely aimed at universities though.
Humanoid Robot Wrestling Competition
Also upcoming is the IROS 2023 Humanoid Robot Wrestling Competition:
https://github.com/cyberbotics/wrestling
European Robotics League
There should also be a 'Smart City' competition in the UK coming September, but I did not find a lot of further info. This is open to companies.
https://eu-robotics.net/eurobotics/activities/european-robotics-league/#erl-news
Rami
There's the Rami campaign for arial robots:
https://metricsproject.eu/inspection-maintenance/aerial-campaigns-2023/
Robocup
Obviously also the robocup:
ELROB 2024
The European Land Robot Trail also seems interesting:
"The military ELROB, which takes place for the ninth time now, enables you to get a glance at the latest R&D in the area of unmanned outdoor/off-road ground systems. The scenarios have been developed in closest co-operation with the military users and reflect the up-to-date requirements of the forces. This event offers the fantastic opportunity to mingle with the international experts from the user community, the industry and the R&D sector."