The 1st edition of this contest will be held from September 27th to October 1st and will focus on aerial and underwater robots specialized in Inspection and Maintenance tasks

CATEC is leading the organization of the first edition of METRICS RAMI competition for aerial robots, to be held in conjunction with IROS 2021 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) from September 27th to October 1st.

This competition will focus on aerial robots only, and the evaluation process will mainly involve tasks related to autonomous navigation and data acquisition for I&M purposes, one of the most promising applications in this sector due to the risks and costs associated with works at height or underwater inspections performed by human operators.

There will be two different challenges (Functionality Benchmarks or FBM):

FBM1: precise navigation without GNSS, since I&M activities may take place in environments with poor GNSS coverage, or even indoors.

  • The execution of this FBM consists in assessing the accuracy of a localization system for the autonomous navigation of aerial robots using only onboard sensors. The evaluation will be based on the comparison of the team’s localization solution with respect to a precise motion capture system. Teams will be provided with several sample flight datasets for testing their solutions, with the aerial robot performing specific trajectories.

FBM2: automatic detection of defects using advanced AI algorithms, which is important for inspectors when they face considerable amounts of data to review.

  • The execution of this FBM consists of assessing the performance of a surface defect detection system. Teams will be provided with a publicly available dataset for training their algorithms. The assessment will be based on an offline analysis of images obtained by the aerial robot, which will show several surface defects artificially placed along with the testing scenario.
    More information about the challenges in this video:

If you are interested in participating, please fill this form before July 10.

This first edition is part of the METRICS project, an initiative that organizes international competitions to evaluate the latest robotics and Artificial Intelligence technologies developed in four priority areas: health, agri-food, inspection and maintenance of infrastructure and agile production.