D1.1 Specification of General Features of Scenarios and Robots for Benchmarking Through Competitions

2013

Technical Report

ps

RoCKIn is a EU-funded project aiming to foster scientific progress and innovation in cognitive systems and robotics through the design and implementation of competitions. An additional objective of RoCKIn is to increase public awareness of the current state-of-the-art in robotics and the innovation potential of robotics applications. From these objectives several requirements for the work performed in RoCKIn can be derived: The RoCKIn competitions must start from convincing, easy-to-communicate user stories, that catch the attention of relevant stakeholders, the media, and the crowd. The user stories play the role of a mid- to long-term vision for a competition. Preferably, the user stories address economic, societal, or environmental problems. The RoCKIn competitions must pose open scientific challenges of interest to sufficiently many researchers to attract existing and new teams of robotics researchers for participation in the competition. The competitions need to promise some suitable reward, such as recognition in the scientific community, publicity for a team’s work, awards, or prize money, to justify the effort a team puts into the development of a competition entry. The competitions should be designed in such a way that they reward general, scientifically sound solutions to the challenge problems; such general solutions should score better than approaches that work only in narrowly defined contexts and are considred over-engineered. The challenges motivating the RoCKIn competitions must be broken down into suitable intermediate goals that can be reached with a limited team effort until the next competition and the project duration. The RoCKIn competitions must be well-defined and well-designed, with comprehensive rule books and instructions for the participants in order to guarantee a fair competition. The RoCKIn competitions must integrate competitions with benchmarking in order to provide comprehensive feedback for the teams about the suitability of particular functional modules, their overall architecture, and system integration. This document takes the first steps towards the RoCKIn goals. After outlining our approach, we present several user stories for further discussion within the community. The main objectives of this document are to identify and document relevant scenario features and the tasks and functionalities subject for benchmarking in the competitions.

@techreport{AhmadAABBBDFHHIKLMNSS2013,
  title = {D1.1 Specification of General Features of Scenarios and Robots for Benchmarking Through Competitions},
  author = {Ahmad, A and Awaad, I and Amigoni, F and Berghofer, J and Bischoff, R and Bonarini, A and Dwiputra, R and Fontana, G and Hegger, F and Hochgeschwender, N and Iocchi, L and Kraetzschmar, G and Lima, PU and Matteucci, M and Nardi, D and Schiaffonati, V and Schneider, S},
  number = {FP7-ICT-601012 Revision 1.0},
  institution = {RoCKIn - Robot Competitions Kick Innovation in Cognitive Systems and Robotics},
  month = jul,
  year = {2013},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {7}
}