Jacobs robots again successful in international competition:
1st Place in simulated planet exploration challenge

Jacobs University’s robotics group gained the first place in the category “autonomous planet exploration” of the “Robotics Challenge” during the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), held from May 19 to 23, 2008, in Pasadena, USA. In total, 16 teams from nine nations participated in the copetition.

[ May 27, 2008]  The annual International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is considered the most prominent robotics conference in the world. This year ICRA for the first time set up competition between robots specializing in differentiated areas of skill: man-machine interaction, remote controlled and autonomous exploration of planets. The robotics team of Jacobs University, under the lead of Professor Dr. Andreas Birk, started in the most difficult discipline, the autonomous exploration of a planet’s surface.

The task of the robots was to completely autonomously navigate a terrain, which was modeled on the planet Mars’ surface, from a landing vehicle to an external measuring station. Four different subtasks were given to be solved without any external assistance of the robots' human „handlers“: safely leaving the lander over a ramp, navigation to the measuring station with continuous sensory data collection of the area for successful obstacle avoidance, the generation of a map, and the safe return to the lander after completion of the exploration mission.

The Jacobs team successfully solved all four subtasks for which it was awarded with four first place standings. The only other team as successful was the Japanese Space Robotics Laboratory of Tohoku University, which used a space rover developed for the Japanese Space Authority JAXA. The jury therefore awarded both teams with a first place in the overall rating, and a second place award to Kansas State University for completing two of the four tasks.

The success of the Jacobs robotics team impressively shows that research and development in the field of protection and rescue robotics can also successfully be applied to planetary space robotics. This applies in particular to intelligent behavior of the robots for autonomous areal reconnaissance. The Jacobs robots mastered the most difficult task of the competition, the identification of passable terrain on the hard-to-travel „Mars surface “, with the help of an algorithm developed by the Jacobs team, which evaluates the environment data of 3D-Sensors. The research on this field garnered particular interest from the conference participants of the Planetary Rover workshop organized by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).