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Motivation

Closing the reality gap is one of the most important research directions toward true embodied intelligence. To reach this objective and deploy learning algorithms on a robot operating in the real world, we need to consider various practical issues: disturbances, observation noise, safety, model mismatch, delays, actuator limitations, physical feasibility, limited real-world interactions, etc.

In addition, we also expect intelligent robots to be reactive in dynamic environments, achieving fast and agile movements and long-horizon planning capabilities.

The Robot Air Hockey Challenge provides a platform for researchers in the field of robot learning to interact with each other on a realistic robotic task. In this competition, teams will design and build their air hockey agents, competing against each other in different subtasks (in simulation) and finally in an entire game (both in simulation and in the real world).

In this challenge, participants should develop a robot agent that:

is robust to environmental disturbances, such as non-ideal physics models, observation noise, and data loss.
pushes the limits of the robot's capability. The robot should hit the puck as fast as possible while dealing with the actuators' limits.
accomplishes safe and reasonable behavior. The robot should keep the end-effectors on the table and stay within its boundaries.
performs dynamic and agile motions. The robot should be reactive to interact with a highly dynamic environment.
adapts to the sim-to-real gap with a limited amount of real system interactions.
finds both the low-level strategy to control the mechanical systems and the high-level strategy to win the game.

Challenge Structure

The main part of the challenge consists of two simulated stages (Qualifying, Simulated Tournament) and one stage in the real world (Real-world Finals). In the qualifying stage, you will prepare your agent in the environments that are provided to you, which should also be robust and capable of adapting to changes. In the Simulated Tournament, the agents will play against each other in a round-robin fashion in modified simulation environments to mimic the sim-to-real gap. Finally, the first 4 teams will be able to deploy their approach on the real robot in the Real-world Finals.

The finalists in the Real-world Finals will be invited to the award ceremony at our IROS workshop.

More information can be found in the Challenge Details.