Paper ID: 2308.16743

A Remote Sim2real Aerial Competition: Fostering Reproducibility and Solutions' Diversity in Robotics Challenges

Spencer Teetaert, Wenda Zhao, Niu Xinyuan, Hashir Zahir, Huiyu Leong, Michel Hidalgo, Gerardo Puga, Tomas Lorente, Nahuel Espinosa, John Alejandro Duarte Carrasco, Kaizheng Zhang, Jian Di, Tao Jin, Xiaohan Li, Yijia Zhou, Xiuhua Liang, Chenxu Zhang, Antonio Loquercio, Siqi Zhou, Lukas Brunke, Melissa Greeff, Wolfgang Hoenig, Jacopo Panerati, Angela P. Schoellig

Shared benchmark problems have historically been a fundamental driver of progress for scientific communities. In the context of academic conferences, competitions offer the opportunity to researchers with different origins, backgrounds, and levels of seniority to quantitatively compare their ideas. In robotics, a hot and challenging topic is sim2real-porting approaches that work well in simulation to real robot hardware. In our case, creating a hybrid competition with both simulation and real robot components was also dictated by the uncertainties around travel and logistics in the post-COVID-19 world. Hence, this article motivates and describes an aerial sim2real robot competition that ran during the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, from the specification of the competition task, to the details of the software infrastructure supporting simulation and real-life experiments, to the approaches of the top-placed teams and the lessons learned by participants and organizers.

Submitted: Aug 31, 2023