Robothon® – The Grand Challenge enters second round

International teams, enthusiastic participants, amazed judges: The premiere of Robothon® – The Grand Challenge 2021 was a resounding success and will enter its next round at automatica 2022. The name of this collaborative software and hardware development competition held within the framework of munich_i is derived from the terms robot and marathon, and addresses robotics fans worldwide. In 2022, 20 participating teams worldwide from 12 countries will once again be confronted with a challenge that has so far remained unsolved – the so-called Grand Challenge. Those who get involved here use state-of-the-art methods to demonstrate the greatest performance possible today. In brief: It's going to be exciting.

The Robothon® 2022 will once again address the industry's most complex unsolved challenges in the fight against environmental pollution: the disassembly and separation of electronic waste. Automated dismantling and separation would enable manufacturers to make their recycling processes much more efficient and sustainable. How this can be accomplished? A strategy must be developed that enables a robot to autonomously recognize, grasp and manipulate loose components in a new production environment.

The Robothon® premiere with its innovative basic concept of web dashboards as digital judge has convinced many: 32 leading research institutes, universities, and industrial partners have joined forces based on this concept to create a European challenge network called ‘eu.ROBIN’, which is funded by the European Commission.

Teams use their own robot platforms to solve the task. In the run-up to the event, they receive a task board specifically modified for the 2022 challenge. At the time of the official start in late April, the specific task with five challenging levels will be distributed along with the score card.

The participants will then have four weeks to develop solutions based on an AI and robotics platform before they have to demonstrate their results online at the beginning of June, 2022. In addition to the concrete solution approach, the execution of the tasks and the speed will also be evaluated. The panel of judges includes high-profile AI and robotics experts as well as industry representatives who will gather on June 21 within the framework of munich_i to award the best teams. For their solutions, their commitment, and their aspiration to actively tackle the problems of our time.

• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Gerd Hirzinger, Former Director of DLR´s Institute of Robotics & Mechatronics (Robothon® Chair)
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Tamim Asfour, KIT (Robothon® Chair)
• Prof. Dr. Patrick van der Smagt, Machine Learning Research Lab der Volkswagen Group (Robothon® Chair)
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sami Haddadin, TUM
• Prof. Dr. Danica Kragic, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Rückert Montanuniversität Leoben, Austria
• Dr. Georg von Wichert, Siemens AG
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jürgen Grotepass, CSO Manufacturing Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH
• Prof. Dr. Aleš Ude, Coordinator of ReconCycle & Jožef Stefan Institute,Slovenia