Hi All,
The representatives of the NIST ARIAC competition have asked me to pass along the following results for the competition. I would highly recommend you check out the video on their website of the final competitors, it is some super fascinating stuff.
We are happy to announce the final results of the 2020 Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC), hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Now in its fourth year, ARIAC is a simulation-based competition designed to address a critical limitation of robots used in industrial environments: that they are not as agile as they need to be. Many robots are not able to quickly detect failures, or recover from those failures. They aren’t able to sense changes in their environment and modify their actions accordingly. The goal of ARIAC is to enable industrial robots on workshop floors to be more productive, more autonomous, and more responsive to the needs of shop floor workers by utilizing the latest advances in artificial intelligence and robot planning.
While autonomously completing order fulfillment tasks, teams were presented with various agility challenges developed based on input from industry representatives. These challenges include:
- Failing suction grippers, requiring teams to determine if products dropped from the gripper should be retrieved or re-positioned,
- Reception of updated/high-priority orders, prompting teams to decide whether or not to reuse existing in-progress shipments being filled or to start new ones from scratch,
- Notification of faulty products, requiring teams to replace inadequate products and plan ahead to ensure enough non-faulty products are available for the high priority orders,
- Products requested flipped from their original positioning, requiring teams to complete a two-step process to place the product
- Intermittent sensor blackouts, and
- And for the first time this year, working in a collaborative environment with humans.
Teams had control over their system’s suite of sensors positioned throughout the workcell, made up of laser scanners, depth cameras, intelligent vision sensors, quality control sensors and interruptible photoelectric break-beams. Each team chose a unique sensor configuration with varying associated costs and impact on the team’s strategy. Teams that focused on sensors requiring a higher level of processing – for example, depth cameras in place of intelligent vision sensors – gained a points boost for their overall lower system cost.
The virtual nature of the competition enabled participation of teams affiliated with companies and research institutions from a range of countries.
Scoring was performed based on a combination of efficiency, performance and cost metrics over 15 trials. Additionally, judges from Amazon, Boeing, and OSRF awarded points for novel, industry-implementable approaches to solving the agility challenges. The overall standings of the finalist teams are as follows.
- First place: Team Virsli, Laszlo Bojtos, Attila Vidacs, Jozsef Peto, Gergely Matyas, Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME VIK TMIT), HSN Lab, Cloud Robotics Group
- Second place: Sirius
- Third place: Team RuBot, ARCL https://arc.cs.rutgers.edu/ , Rutgers University
- Fourth place: Pack Swiftly. Steven Gray
- Fifth place: Irgum, Andras Polgar
The top three eligible teams will receive cash prizes.
You can find out more information about ARIAC at: www.nist.gov/ariac
Highlights from the ARIAC 2020 competition can be found at: https://tube.nist.gov/media/0_5oy6lxgu (appears to be down)
Congratulations to all teams that participated in the competition! Planning for ARIAC 2021 will now begin.