【ICRA2019 AI Challenge Live Text Tutorial Session with Q&A】

Thanks all for joining the competition!

Good afternoon from aus

After receiving all teams’ proposal, to sum up, we find most of the teams already had a good command of the robot system design for the game scenario. However, there are still some general problems existed that may cause negative effect on your competition preparation:

1.        Here are few basic modules you must implement in the game:

a)        Localization
b)        Motion planning and control
c)        Visual (armor detection) gimbal servo control with projectile trajectory prediction
d)        Projectile supply (from navigation to visual servo control)
e)        Decision making system

Besides, enemy robot detection, game field segmentation can also be applied to the robot.

2.        Pay much more attention to the NAVIGATION system for localization and obstacle avoidance motion planning. It is the basic element of your robot. Only to know how to run open sourced package cannot guarantee the performance of your robot. The penalty of collision is strict without any concession.

3.        Be sure your solution is PRACTICAL and FEASIBLE with more engineering consideration.

For example,
a)        if you use model-based filtering algorithm, please build your sensor model accurately enough or your algorithm robust enough in the game scenario, especially for UWB and IMU.
b)        If you use learning based algorithm, take care of the computing source for onboard PC so that all algorithms can process in acceptable and steady frequencies at the same time.
c)        If your algorithm highly depends on visual features. Think more about the light condition and possible accidents for enemy robots in the game scenario.
d)        If you want to set up a wireless link for communication between robots, take the transmission quality and delay into consideration.

4.        A stable system is a time-consuming work in the competition preparation period. It should take more than half of your preparation period to TEST instead of DESIGN. As the whole system is a combination of different modules, the buckets effect will have an obvious influence on the system performance, especially for visual servo control. Accurately targeting and hitting the armour of enemy robots needs to fine-tune detection, projectile trajectory prediction and gimbal servo control. In addition, decision making in the simulation is quite different from that in the real game scenario. Partially observable decision process needs testing to find the appropriate action space.