Robothon® FAQ

The competition will start on April 28, 2025. All teams will be given one month to work on the tasks. The live presentation with the Grand Challenge Jury will take place on June 1-3, 2025. The winning teams will be informed after June 4, and they will be awarded on-site during the automatica trade fair from June 26, 2025 in Munich.

The Robothon® takes place 100 % digitally as a part of munich_i and will be integrated in the automatica exhibition in Munich. Selected teams will receive a competition task board by mail to participate remotely from their own robot lab. In doing so, we aim to make the Robothon® the lowest barrier-to-entry, real-world manipulation competition for roboticists from all parts of the world to participate in cutting edge robotics.

The competition starts right after the challenge kickoff meeting. The teams have four weeks to develop an autonomous robotic solution to the challenge task board. Participants will receive a brand-new task board for the 2025 challenge after their application has been reviewed and accepted by the organizers. This year’s challenge involves five new increasingly difficult manipulation tasks. The final rules and competition scorecard will be released at the start of the development period at the kickoff meeting. Teams will be evaluated on their robotic solution in terms of number of tasks completed, execution speed, robustness, and creativity. The Grand Challenge Jury includes high-profile AI and robotics experts as well as industry representatives who will award the best teams with recognition and prize money of at least € 10,000. The competition will conclude with an Award Ceremony presented at the automatica trade fair in Munich within the framework of munich_i.

All teams are kindly asked to use their own development computer, robot and tools. Each team will receive a competition task board via mail to participate in the competition. A trial protocol and competition scorecard will be shared with the teams at the kickoff event. Find more information here about our recommendation for minimum platform requirements. For further questions, please send an email to robothon@munich-i.com.

The Challenge starts on April 28, 2025, 13:00 - 14:00 CET !

• For this purpose, a digital appointment will be arranged in advance
• All teams will receive the competition task board in advance by mail
• The scorecard, rules, and guidelines will be sent to all teams after the digital kickoff meeting

• You and your team work will have one month to develop an autonomous solution to the tasks on the competition task board with your robot platform
• Deliverables due on May 28, 23:59 CET sent via this form
  • Recorded Video – Team Presentation: This video gives the team the opportunity to describe their solution to the Grand Jury. It is recommended to introduce the robotic hardware used in the solution and discuss the algorithms used in solving the challenge. Also in this video, teams should highlight the transferability of their solution with the Bring-Your-Own-Device challenge. Teams can also highlight their learning journey and lessons learned through participating in the competition. This video is limited to 5-minutes in length.
  • Recorded Video – Uncut of Back-to-Back Robot Trials: This video captures the robustness of your solution in an uncut video of five subsequent trial attempts with your robot platform on the competition task board. This video is limited to 10-minutes in length. You may speed up the video between active trials as necessary.
  • Code Repository / Project Documentation: This repository should contain a ReadMe file with a brief description of the robotic platform used in the competition. It should also include a list of hardware components used in the robot platform as a table and a list of software dependencies to frameworks and libraries used. Finally, it shall include a Quick Start Section that describes how to operate the robot platform as shown in the final demonstrations.

• Team scorecards, live jury presentation video, and task board measurements will be considered in the Grand Jury´s evaluation.
• Changes to your team or robot platform during the development period must be reported early in writing to robothon@munich_i.com

A detailed event schedule will follow once your participation has been confirmed. Selected teams will be invited to our community Slack workspace for communication throughout the competition. Please feel free to contact the organizers at any time via email robothon@munich-i.com.
We ask you to include your team name in emails to the organizers with the following subject title “[TEAM NAME] <Your Subject>”.

munich_i is a joint project of automatica and the Munich Insitute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) to bring together science, business, politics and start-ups to shape the future progress in AI and robotics. The three parts of the project are: the Hightech Summit, the AI.Society as well as Robothon®. automatica sprint and munich_i successfully premiered together from June 22 to 24, 2021: There was consistently positive and sometimes enthusiastic participant feedback on the new digital format in the automatica portfolio and the globally unique munich_i Hightech Summit on robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Over 3,500 participants from the robotics and automation industry took the opportunity to exchange ideas and network online at automatica sprint – and to digitally immerse themselves in the world of AI and robotics at munich_i.

The Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), founded by The Technical University of Munich (TUM) as an Integrative Research Center in the field of robotics and machine intelligence, to develop innovative and sustainable technologies and solutions for central challenges of our time.