Announcing the Roboethics Competition (R2D2) at RO-MAN2021

We are pleased to publish the announcement and the Call for Participants to the Roboethics Competition (R2D2) at RO-MAN2021.

Call for Participants

We are excited to announce the launch of the Roboethics Competition a brand new, roboethics-themed design competition hosted at the . Imagine a near-future scenario where a home robot can find and bring items to people. If a visitor asks the robot to bring him/her one of the household member’s wallets, how should the robot be programmed to respond? How about when an underaged member of the family asks for an alcoholic drink?

Your task as a team of students, scholars, or professionals is to program the robot to respond to the requests in a simulated home environment with ethics in mind. Top teams will be invited to a presentation and Q&A session (over Zoom) with a diverse panel of judges who will determine the 1st place winner. Members of the public will be invited to vote for their favourite designs to select the citizen’s award winner.

Prizes: 1st place winner ($1000 CAD), citizen’s award winner ($500 CAD)

Dates:

• Full API & competition files available to teams: Mid-July
• Submission deadline: Aug. 1st, 2021 (23:59, Anywhere on Earth)
• Evaluation day (Q&A with the judges): Aug. 8th, 2021, 10:00-14:00 EST (14:00-18:00 GMT)
• Notification of Winners: Aug. 11th, 2021

Visit the competition website (https://r2d2.raiselab.ca/) for further design challenge details, including high-level API descriptions. We encourage multidisciplinary teams of students, scholars, and professionals to participate. Interested participants are encouraged to register in order to receive latest competition-related updates.

Eligibility:

At least one person in a team needs to be comfortable programming in Python. Familiarity with ROS and Gazebo will be an asset in programming the robot in the simulated environment, but not required. The teams do not need to be proficient in advanced robotics topics (e.g., object recognition, navigation, grasping), as these functional robot tasks will be simplified for the competition. Only one person per team is required to register as an attendee of the RO-MAN conference ($30USD).

Don’t have a team yet?

Are you an engineer/programmer looking to team up with someone with social sciences/humanities, or the reverse? The Open Roboethics Institute will help you find a teammate.

R2D2 Competition Chairs:AJung Moon, Brandon DeHart, Jimin Rhim

Information

AJung Moon, Assistant Professor (ECE), Director, RAISE lab, McGill University

ajung.moon@mcgill.ca