Robothon® – The Grand Challenge: A global robotics competition in advanced manipulation

Hardware. Software. Teamware.

Robothon® – The Grand Challenge is back!

Robothon® – The Grand Challenge returns to automatica 2025 with a new twist: evolving from robot manipulation to intuitive manipulation. This global robotics competition focuses on developing intelligent, responsive robot behavior for real-world tasks — and this year’s challenge pushes that even further.

Now in its fourth edition, Robothon® gathers international teams to tackle one of the most urgent issues of our time: electronic waste. Participants are tasked with building autonomous systems that perform complex manipulation tasks on an electronic task board and then transfer these skills to an application processing an e-waste object of their choice.

Important dates:

  • Kick-off Meeting, May 2
  • Submit your Results, June 9
  • Live Presentations with Expert Jury, June 11,12
  • Award Ceremony, June 27

Push robotic intuition forward — explore real-world challenges.

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How Robothon® works

Participants must first apply to join the competition. Once their applications have been reviewed and accepted, they will receive a brand-new task board for the 2025 challenge.

The competition officially begins with the kickoff meeting, where the final rules and competition scorecard will be released. Immediately after this meeting, teams enter a four-week development phase to build an autonomous robotic solution for the challenge task board.

This year’s challenge features five new manipulation tasks, each increasing in difficulty.

Teams will be evaluated based on the number of tasks completed, execution speed, robustness, and creativity of their robotic solution.

A Grand Challenge Jury—composed of leading AI and robotics experts as well as industry representatives—will assess the teams and award the top performers with recognition and a prize of at least €10,000.

The competition will conclude with an Award Ceremony at the automatica trade fair in Munich, as part of the munich_i platform.

Did you know?

The distributed format of the Robothon® competition and global reach of web dashboards as a digital judge has led to the formation of a new EU-funded project: 31 leading research institutes, universities, and industrial partners have joined forces using a similar concept to create a pan-European challenge network called ‘euROBIN’.

Further information

Testimonials

"We are facing two major challenges. First, how can digital technologies like Al and robotics transform our life for the better. And second, how can we protect our beautiful planet. For me, these goals are not opposed to each other, but must be considered together. I am very glad and proud to see the Robothon® and all participating teams demonstrate how this can work!"

"It is an honour and a pleasure for me to serve as a jury member for Robothon®. The now applied competition e-waste disassembly between Humans and Robots is a new important field."