Competition Categories
Academia Category
Overview
Academia category is for undergraduates and postgraduates. In this category, each participating team will build a teleoperated or autonomous robot (UGV). The robot must be remotely controlled to perform missions in a minefield environment.
Competition Tasks
The robot must detect buried and surface metallic objects, navigate rough terrain, generate high-precision maps, and collect surface mines using an autonomous or teleoperated system.
Minefield Description
The competition area is a 20m x 20m field marked only by plastic tape. No additional markings are used.
- Buried Mines: 10x10x10 cm metallic cubes buried up to 10 cm underground.
- Surface Mines: 5x5x5 cm black metallic cubes placed above ground. Locations change every match.
Note
For more details and scoring sheet, check the Rule Book.
Junior Category
Overview
Junior category is for preparatory and high school students. In this category, each participating team will build a teleoperated or autonomous ground robot (UGV). The robot must be remotely controlled to perform missions in a minefield environment.
Competition Tasks
The robot must search for surface-laid and buried metallic cubical objects that simulate anti-personnel landmines and unexploded ordnances. It must navigate rough terrain and collect surface mines using autonomous or teleoperated mechanisms.
Minefield Description
The competition area is a 20m x 20m field of grass or desert land. It is marked only by plastic tape. No flags or internal lines are used.
- Buried Mines: 10x10x10 cm metallic cubes buried up to 10 cm underground.
- Surface Mines: 5x5x5 cm black metallic cubes placed above ground. Locations change every match.
Note
For more details and scoring sheet, check the Rule Book.
ROS
To participate in the competition with ROS you must build the software of your robot system using Robot Operating System (ROS). The competition mission is the same as other categories, but the score is multiplied by 1.2 when using ROS.
ROS is an open-source platform that provides software libraries and tools to help build robot applications including hardware abstraction, device drivers, message passing, and more.
What is ROS?
ROS simplifies creating complex robot behavior across different platforms. It is widely used in robotics research and development.
Resources
Multi-Robot Systems (MRS)
Multi-robot systems (MRS) are a group of robots designed to perform collective behavior. Through cooperation, tasks that are impossible for a single robot become feasible and more efficient.
Benefits of MRS
- Resolving task complexity
- Increasing performance
- Increasing reliability
- Simplicity in design
Role in Humanitarian Demining
MRS can play a crucial role in humanitarian demining. According to SOPs, human deminers use metal detectors to identify targets, which are then flagged for digging by a supervisor.
The MRS approach mimics this process using multiple unmanned teleoperated and autonomous vehicles. Teleoperated robots act as deminers, while an autonomous robot acts as the supervisor or team leader.
The team leader uses a gripper or marking mechanism to mark detected landmines. If two deminers are used, they operate in assigned lanes and one starts after the other.
When a deminer detects a mine, it must activate a warning siren for at least 2 seconds and report its location. All robots pause while the team leader marks the mine, then scanning continues until the entire arena is covered.
UAVs / Drones
UAVs / Drones are allowed to be used in the competition to perform the same tasks as teleoperated or autonomous robots in all categories.
If a team uses a UAV, it will receive an additional 20% bonus score added to the main mission score.