Microrobotics Challenge
The National Institute of Standards and Technology will be hosting a mobile microrobotics competition during the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) meeting to be held May 3 - 8, 2010, in Anchorage, Alaska.
Proposal Deadline Extended to: January 15th, 2010
NEW: NIST Mobile Microrobotics Challenge, 2010 Call for Participants
NEW: Official Rules - NIST Mobile Microrobotics Challenge
Past NIST microrobotics competitions include events at RoboCup 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia; at the RoboCup 2008 U.S. Open in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and at RoboCup 2009 in Graz, Austria.
Recent advances in the design and fabrication of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have enabled the development of mobile microrobots that can autonomously navigate and manipulate in controlled environments. It is expected that this technology will be critical in applications as varied as intelligent sensor networks, in vivo medical diagnosis and treatment, and adaptive microelectronics.
However, many challenges remain, particularly with respect to locomotion, power storage, embedded intelligence, and motion measurement. As a result, NIST has organized performance-based competitions for mobile microrobots that are designed to: 1) motivate researchers to accelerate microrobot development, 2) reveal the most pressing technical challenges, and 3) evaluate the most successful methods for locomotion and manipulation at the microscale (e.g., actuation techniques for crawling).
