Robot competition

Dean Kamen, Founder of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), created the world's leading high school robotics competition. FIRST provides a varsity-like competitive forum that inspires in young people, their schools and communities an appreciation of science and technology.

Their robotics competition is a multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. Their outreach includes the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), the FIRST Vex Challenge (FVC), the FIRST Lego League (FLL), and Junior FIRST Lego League (JFLL). These four competitons are each geared separately at students aged 14-18, 14-18, 9-14, and 6-9 respectively. In 2005, there were over 100,000 students and 40,000 adult mentors from around the world involved in at least one of FIRST's competitions.

Unlike the Robot sumo wrestling competitions that take place regularly in some venues, or the Battlebots competitions on TV, these competitions include the creation of a robot. For the FLL program, the robots are entirely autonomous; the FVC competition involves separate autonomous and driver control matches; and the FRC competition involves an autonomous period (10 or 15 seconds) followed by a driver control in their matches.

RoboCup is a competitive organization dedicated to developing a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team by the year 2050. There are many different leagues ranging from computer simulation, to full-size humanoid robots.

RoboCup Junior is similar to RoboCup. RoboCup Junior is a competition for primary and secondary school aged students. RoboCup Junior includes three competitions:

• soccer - two robots per team play autonomously in a game of soccer
• rescue - an obstacle course in which a robot must follow a line to retrieve an object, and bring it back to safety as fast as possible
• dance - robots are designed to dance to music and are judged on criteria such as creativity and costumes

As is the case with RoboCup, all robots are designed and developed solely by the students and act autonomously without any form of remote control or human intervention.

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a competition for robotic vehicles to complete an under-200 mile, off-road course in the Mojave Desert. The unclaimed 2004 prize was $1,000,000. The farthest any participant got was only 7.4 miles. However, the 2005 prize of $2,000,000 was claimed by Stanford University. In this race, four vehicles successfully completed the race. This is a testament to how fast robotic vision and navigation are improving.

The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) is a competition for autonomous ground vehicles that must traverse outdoor obstacle courses without any human interaction. This international competition sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), is a student design competition at the university level and has held annual competitions since 1992.

The two AAAI Grand Challenges focus on Human Robot Interaction, with one being a robot attending and delivering a conference talk, the other being operator-interaction challenges in rescue robotics.

The Centennial Challenges are NASA prize contests for non-government funded technological achievements, including robotics, by US citizens.

In Micromouse competitions, small robots try to solve a maze in the fastest time.

The popularity of the TV shows Robot Wars Robotica and Battlebots, of college level robot-sumo wrestling competitions, the success of "smart bombs" and UCAVs in armed conflicts, grass-eating "gastrobots" in Florida, and the creation of a slug-eating robot in England, suggest that the fear of an artificial life form doing harm, or competing with natural wild life, is not an illusion. The worldwide Green Parties in 2002 were asking for public input on extending their existing policies against such competition, as part of more general biosafety and biosecurity concerns. It appears that, like Aldous Huxley's concerns about human cloning, questions Karel Čapek raised eighty years earlier in science fiction have become real debates.

The Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory (http://maslab.csail.mit.edu) is one of the few college-level vision-based autonomous robotics competition in the world. Conducted by and for MIT undergraduates, this competition requires multithreaded applications of image processing, robotic movements, and target ball deposition. The robots are run with debian linux and run on an independent OrcBoard platform that facilitates sensor-hardware additions and recognition.