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

TL;DR

This paper presents a hybrid aerial sim2real robotics competition designed to promote reproducibility and diversity in solutions, including details on the setup, infrastructure, top approaches, and lessons learned.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid simulation and real-world competition framework for aerial robots, fostering progress and comparison in sim2real transfer research.

Findings

Successful implementation of a hybrid simulation-real competition

Diverse approaches from top teams demonstrating different sim2real strategies

Lessons learned to improve future robotics competitions

Abstract

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. Hence, this article motivates and describes an aerial sim2real robot competition that ran during the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, from the specification of the competition task, to the details of the software infrastructure supporting simulation and real-life experiments, to the approaches of the top-placed teams and the lessons learned by participants and organizers.