Connectionists: [meetings] [news] The 2nd Earth Rover Challenge -- ICRA 2025 Competition

[Xuesu Xiao]

Dear roboticists,

do you want to compete with human gamers and AI agents in an around-the-world real life Mario Kart game? The Earth Rover Challenge is back at ICRA 2025!!! 

It is a first of its kind "AI vs Humans" distributed robotics competition where human gamers and AI models compete to solve real-world navigation challenges across the world, where your policies will be deployed in realistic goal-oriented navigation scenarios, potentially without known maps. 

As a participant, team, you'll get: 

-- standardized training data (>7k hours of real-world teleop driving data collected from 20+ cities)

-- sponsored robot hardware, (2 x Earth Rover Mini (https://shop.frodobots.com/) for your own testing)

-- access to global fleet of sidewalk robots for real-world evaluation of your models (in 20+ cities across 6 continents)

-- compute resources assistance (8x H100s shared among teams)

-- well-tested SDK (https://github.com/frodobots-org/earth-rovers-sdk) to connect your model to the robots

In addition:

-- no requirement to physically attend ICRA in Atlanta to compete (as your models will be hosted in the cloud while remotely controlling robots in various cities)

-- anonymous entry allowed (i.e., only competition co-organizers will know your team's identity - mainly needed to coordinate testing trials before competition)

For more context, this is what happened at the 1st Earth Rover Challenge held at IROS 2024 in Abu Dhabi (https://x.com/frodobots/status/1850426432142573937).

Please fill out this form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfu6HbS1-ppK5FVARtwDwTYs7FcH5SRL4xbbbsXr2j4Um1KVQ/viewform?usp=header) by January 10 2025 to express your interest in participating, and we'll be in touch with more info.

Thanks,

ERC2025 Organizing Committee

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Competition Website: https://sites.google.com/view/the-earth-rover-challenge/ 

Organizing Committee Email: erc2025-organizers at googlegroups.com 

Organizing Team: FrodoBots (Michael Cho, Niresh Dravin, Santiago Pravisani), Google DeepMind (Jie Tan, Dhruv Shah, Ted Xiao, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Zhuo Xu), National University of Singapore (David Hsu), Georgia Tech (Naoki Yokoyama), George Mason University (Xuesu Xiao), Meta (Joanne Truong)

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Thanks
Xuesu


-----------------------
Xuesu Xiao, Ph.D.
--
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
George Mason University
xiao at gmu.edu
https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/
https://robotixx.cs.gmu.edu/



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