MBZIRC2020

The Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotic Challenge (MBZIRC) is an ambitious innovative robotic challenge organized by the Kalifa University, taking place at Abu Dhabi.
This challenge fosters research labs to push robotic technologies to the limits, innovating new systems and methodologies to face challenging tasks inspired by a variety of real applications.
Those cover construction, manufacturing, inspection, disaster response, and many others. 

These challenges involve heterogeneous teams of robots (e.g., ground and aerial vehicles) that have to cooperate in a fully autonomous way and dynamic, unstructured environments. The complexity of MBZIRC pushes the best selected international teams to propose novel and unique solutions. These new proposed robotc systems attract very high interest from international media and leading tech-companies, as shown in the last edition (MBZIRC 2017).

The Challenges

MBZIRC 2020 proposes three challenges plus a Grand Challenge:
  • Challenge 1 is inspired by the problem of intrusion of malicious Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In this challenge, a team of UAVs has to track and capture others ``intruder UAVs''.
  • Challenge 2 is inspired by applications related to construction. In this challenge, a heterogeneous team of UAVs and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) have to cooperatively build a pre-defined structure based on different types of brick-shaped objects that have to be autonomously located, picked, transported and assembled.
  • Challenge 3 is inspired by urban firefighting scenarios in urban high rise building. Also in this challenge, a heterogeneous team of UAVs and UGVs have to cooperatively work to extinguish several simulated fires.
  • The Grand Challenge requires the group of  UAVs and UGVs to perform the combination of previously mentioned challenges in a triathlon way.  
 
More information about the challenges can be found at https://www.mbzirc.com/challenge/2020.
These challenges involve some of the most interesting and understudy robotic problems as autonomous navigation in complex, unstructured and dynamic environments with minimal prior knowledge. The localization problem is made even harder by the presence of outdoor-indoor GPS-denied environments with low visibility (e.g.., due to the smoke). 
Besides localization, other problems involved in the challenges are the recognition, tracking and complex manipulation of 3D objects with both aerial and ground robots, requiring aerial and ground physical interaction.