Home | Call for Participation | Schedule | Organizers | Participants Welcome to the 2009 Multi-robot Teaming Challenge, to be held at the Intl. Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Cooperation is exploited throughout nature, from humans to insects, to allow individuals of a given capability to achieve tasks of higher complexity and exploit parallelism and robustness. As single robots become more capable, so should our ability to program multi-robot teams to achieve tasks of greater complexity. The goal of this multi-year challenge is to advance the state of the art --- in both research and practical applications --- of multi-robot teams. In this first year of the challenge, we aim to bring together an exhibition of several research groups to demonstrate how multiple robots can coordinate to achieve tasks that are beyond the ability of single robots to achieve on their own. Example tasks include forming ad-hoc wireless networks between distant objects of interest, coordinated search and discovery, collective transport of larger objects, or even collective construction. The first year goal is to exhibit and explore a range of tasks and approaches to multi-robot teams, and to use this as a basis for designing future more targeted challenges. Our long-term goal is to define a series of increasingly challenging experiments for future events that push forward both research and practical applications of multi-robot systems. The challenge problems will enable methods and results can be comparatively analyzed amongst the robotics community though sharing and experimental reproducibility. By using low-cost platforms, there is also the potential to enable many more AI and robotics research groups to participate in this research. One key focus of this years challenge will be to brainstorm such a series of challenges that can excite and advance multi-robot team research. Call For Participation The first year goal is to exhibit and explore a range of tasks and approaches to multi-robot teams. We welcome groups to bring examples of multi-robot teams that perform coordinated tasks. Our long-term aim is to define a series of challenges that promote practical applications of multi-robot teams, as well as allow common benchmark problems to compare different coordination techniques. CONTRIBUTIONS can include live hardware demonstrations and/or short video clips, showcasing multi-robot teams. We highly encourage bringing hardware demonstrations where possible. Those interested in contributing should submit a 1-2 page proposal, by March 10 2009, containing the following information: - the names and affiliation of the exhibitors - description of the demonstration and objectives - citations to relevant or supporting papers - for a hardware demonstration, a list and short description of the hardware SUBMISSION can be done via email to: rad@eecs.harvard.edu Notifications of acceptance will be sent by March 20, 2009. TRAVEL SUPPORT may be possible for selected participants and their hardware, depending on available funds and level of demand. MISSION: the IJCAI 2009 Robot Challenge will serve as the foundation for more focused and commonly pursued challenges for AAAI 2010 and beyond. The IJCAI 2009 Robotics site can be consulted for more information about the overall robotics events: http://robotics.cs.brown.edu/ijcai09/ Schedule The Multi-Robot Teaming Challenge will be held in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, in Pasadena, CA, July 13-16, 2009. Detailed schedule of Events, TBD Organizers Radhika Nagpal (Harvard University) Chad Jenkins (Brown University) Justin Werfel (NECSI/Harvard Medical School) Chih-han Yu (Harvard University) Participants Jesse Butterfield, Chad Jenkins, Brown University Mobile Multi-hop Wireless Networks using Belief Propagation James McLurkin, Berkeley/MIT Robot Swarms Ari Requicha, Dan Arbuckle, Thanaphon Tangchoopon, University of Southern California Active Self-Assembly Ricardo Martins, Paulo Sousa Dias, Jose Pinto, P. B. Sujit, Joao Borges Sousa University of Porto Multiple Underwater Vehicle Coordination for Ocean Exploration Chih-Han Yu, Radhika Nagpal Harvard University Self-Adapting Modular Robotics Mike Rubenstein, Wei-Min Shen, University of Southern California Modular Robots and Multi-Robot Systems David Leal Martinez, Helsinki University of Technology Reconfigurable Multi-Robot Systems, based on Lego Mindstorms