Dates for euRathlon 2014 announced
The euRathlon Robotics competition will take place between the 29th September and the 3rd of October, 2014 at the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia, Italy. The competition is organised as part of the FP7 euRathlon project, funded by the European Commission.
Teams of researchers, masters and PhD students, industry professionals and other stakeholders from all over the world will compete to win the cash prizes available for each category and discover the latest technological innovations in the field of Robotics.
This year’s penultimate competition will showcase the capabilities of robots such Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), designed to navigate in marine environments. The challenges teams will face include ‘Long range autonomous underwater navigation’ where robots are deployed from a distance and must navigate underwater to successfully reach a disaster area and ‘Environmental survey of the accident area’ where the vehicles are expected to undertake a complete survey of an accident site in order to map and evaluate the status of potentially hazardous items, also known as Objects of Potential Interest (OPIs).
The third task involves testing the Robots’ abilities to detect and localise the leakage of dangerous substances such as chemicals into the sea and inspect structures such as pipelines (Leak localisation and structure inspection), and to come into contact with those structures and manipulate objects to fix them (Interaction with underwater structures). The final challenge is for the Robots to complete all of the aforementioned tasks sequentially (Combined scenario).
The euRathlon competition was initially deployed in September 2013 in Berchtesgaden, Germany. The purpose of the 2013 competition was to test the capabilities of land-based robots, where ICARUS Consortium partners, SPACEAPPS and IMM-IAIR, came third in the ‘Mobile Manipulation for handling hazardous material’ and the ‘Reconnaissance and Surveillance of Urban Structures (USAR)’ challenges respectively.
The final euRathlon Challenge will be held in Italy in 2015 and will involve testing the capabilities of combined teams of terrestrial, marine and aerial robots to work cooperatively to accomplish specific tasks.
The aim of the euRathlon project is to organise outdoor competitions to test the intelligence and autonomous capabilities of robots in simulated scenarios inspired by the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe.
For further information or to make an application to participate in this year’s competition, see the euRathlon website: www.eurathlon.eu
Interested applicants must apply before the deadlines specified on the euRathlon website.
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