2021 NIST manufacturing Results Announced
Screenshot from the 2021 ARIAC Competition
The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) just announced the results for this year’s Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC) competition. The ARIAC competition is a simulated robotics competition that focuses on developing advanced robotics capabilities for manufacturing. The competition makes heavy use of both ROS and Gazebo to simulate a realistic manufacturing and logistics center where humans, robots, and manufacturing infrastructure must work together to successfully complete a number of tasks. Participants in the competion are scored according to a number of factors including how quickly they can perform a given task, and the overall quality of the work. This short video from NIST, and this video of the 2017 competition champion, give a good overview of the tasks the competitors have to perform. While they may look like a simple video game, manufacturing simulations, often called “digital twins”, are an emerging technology that allow managers, industrial operations engineers, and logistics specialists a chance to build and evaluate new manufacturing approaches in software before committing to costly projects.
This was the fifth yearly ARIAC competition, with each year’s competition examing a different set of robotics capabilities. By using a factory floor simulated in Gazebo NIST has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for ARIAC, and it attracts a wide variety of participants. This year’s participants included multiple university reseach groups, a handful of small business, and even a local high-school robotics club.
Our contacts at NIST asked us to share the results of the competion results with broader ROS and Gazebo community. The results are sumarized below and can also be found at the NIST ARIAC website.
We are happy to announce the results of the 2021 ARIAC Competition:
Team Reaper, Peng Zeng, Guangxi Wan, Qingwei Dong, Tong Zhang, Xiaoting Dong, Yunpeng He, Yongchao Feng, Shenyang Institute of Automation,Chinese Academy of Sciences, NCS Lab, Intelligent Manufacturing System Group (Link coming soon: http://ncs.sia.cn/Article/ShowArticle.asp?ArticleID=219 7 ) (1st Place)
Team TheItalianJob, Gerardo Puga, Ekumen, https://www.ekumenlabs.com/ 7 (2nd Place)
Team Sirius, (3rd Place, $10,000 prize)
Team Boston University ECE, Matthew Boyd, Tom Panenko, Forest Song, Eshed Ohn-Bar, Boston University Electrical & Computer Engineering Department (4th Place, $5,000 prize)
Team UTA Robotic Vision Lab, Minh Tram and William Beksi, University of Texas at Arlington, http://rvl.uta.edu 2 (5th Place, $2,500 prize)
Team DRC Chargers, Rohith Venkataramanan , Arya Sasikumar, Iniyan Sasikumar, Sasikumar Allidurai, Dublin Robotics Cub www.dublinroboticsclub.com 3 (6th Place)
The scoring was performed based on a combination of performance, efficiency and cost metrics across the trials, in addition to the results from a panel of three Judges.
Congratulations to all the participating teams on their innovative solutions to the problems posed by the ARIAC 2021 Competition.