The competition

Team’s must provide details about their intended robot platform in their team application. Our goal is to provide the lowest barrier to entry for teams to participate in cutting edge robotics research and welcome all teams, from universities and companies, to apply. The competition seeks to find the best automated solution for the challenge tasks. Human performance is established as a baseline measurement for all solutions and, therefore, bimanual systems may be preferred. All the challenge tasks have been designed to be completed with a single arm manipulator and pinch gripper. The organizers will review each team’s robotic platform in their application and will create performance categories for teams with significantly different hardware as deemed necessary by the Grand Jury.

Safety: All participating teams are responsible for their own safety when operating equipment in connection with the competition. As such, the organizers do not take responsibility for damages that may occur.

• RECORDED VIDEO - TEAM PRESENTATION
  This video gives the team the opportunity to describe their solution to the Grand Jury. It is recommended to introduce the robotic hardware used in the solution and discuss the algorithms used in solving the challenge. Also in this video, teams should highlight the transferability of their solution with the Bring-Your-Own-Device challenge. Teams can also highlight their learning journey and lessons learned through participating in the competition. This video is limited to 5-minutes in length

• RECORDED VIDEO - UNCUT OF BACK-TO-BACK Robot Trials:
  This video captures the robustness of your solution in an uncut video of five subsequent trial attempts with your robot platform on the competition task board. This video is limited to 10-minutes in length. You may speed up the video between active trials as necessary.

• CODE REPOSITORY / PROJECT DOCUMENTATION - Part I
  This repository should contain a ReadMe file with a brief description of the robotic platform used in the competition. It should also include a list of hardware components used in the robot platform as a table and a list of software dependencies to frameworks and libraries used. Finally, it shall include a Quick Start Section that describes how to operate the robot platform as shown in the final demonstrations. Please add a .zip folder of your repository with a readme from github.

• CODE REPOSITORY / PROJECT DOCUMENTATION - Part II
  Please add a web link to your github repository.

• Task board and trial scorecards will be sent to teams at the start of Robothon® at the End of March

• During the 30-day development period, teams shall develop their robot platform to complete trials where it moves the task board from its starting state to the goal state without any human intervention.

• Teams will be graded using an uncut video of their robot performing their solution on their task board AND with a Live Presentation with the Grand Challenge Jury to be scheduled over a video call

• Prior to starting a trial, teams must move the task board to a random location on velcro strips on a table in front of the robot to prevent pre-programming fixed motion paths

• Once a trial has started, each team’s robot is expected to complete the entire set of tasks autonomously. Each human intervention will incur negative points for the team’s final trial score

• Trial runs will have a maximum run time of 10 minutes

• No more than 2 trial attempts will be permitted during the Live Presentation with the Grand Challenge Jury

• Teams who earn equal numbers of points will be distinguished by the fastest total trail completion time