Mohammed Bin Zayeed Robotics Challenge

The Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) is an international robotics competition held by the Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, with a prize pool and team sponsorship worth of 5 Million USD. Following our team's great success in the previous round (2017), we were heading to the next finals in February 2020 with the highest ambitions. The competition is fierce, as only 31 teams out of 200 managed to advance into the finals.

The MBZIRC 2020 challenges are motivated by pushing technological and application boundaries in robotics. The technological challenges addressed in the MBZIRC 2020 Challenges include, fast autonomous navigation in semi-unstructured, complex, dynamic environments, with reduced visibility (e.g. smoke) and minimal prior knowledge, robust perception and tracking dynamic objects in 3D, sensing and avoiding obstacles, GPS denied navigation in indoor-outdoor environments, physical interactions, complex mobile manipulations, and air-surface collaboration.

The MBZIRC 2020 competition took place in Abu Dhabi during 23-25 February 2020 preceded by three days of rehearsals. We successfully competed in all disciplines. In Challenge 1, three drones were supposed to pop balloons and catch a ball carried by foreign UAV following a 3D trajectory. We placed 2nd in the Challenge 1. In Challenge 2, three UAVs and one UGV had to cooperatively build multiple walls. We won the wall building challenge and got the US$250,000 price money. Challenge 3 consisted of outdoor and indoor fires that the team of three UAVs and one UGV had to extinguish. We finished the fire fighting challenge at 4th place. Finally, due to our great results in all three challenges, we qualified to the Grand Challenge where all three challenges are combined together and solved simultaneously. We won the Grand Challenge among all teams from prestigious universities.