A Remote Sim2real Aerial Competition: Fostering Reproducibility and Solutions' Diversity in Robotics Challenges

Understand

Shared benchmark problems have historically been a fundamental driver of progress for scientific communities.

• In the context of academic conferences, competitions offer the opportunity to researchers with different origins, backgrounds, and levels of seniority to quantitatively compare their ideas.
• In robotics, a hot and challenging topic is sim2real-porting approaches that work well in simulation to real robot hardware.
• In our case, creating a hybrid competition with both simulation and real robot components was also dictated by the uncertainties around travel and logistics in the post-COVID-19 world.