Tech innovators will vie for a staggering prize money in excess of USD 3 million when Abu Dhabi hosts the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) in June 2023.
Participants will be seeking marine safety and security solutions to have a shot at the prize fund.
Organised by ASPIRE, the dedicated technology programme management pillar of the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), the overarching advanced technology research body in Abu Dhabi, the MBZIRC is held every two years.
The upcoming edition, called MBZIRC Maritime Grand Challenge, focuses on real-time solutions to maritime safety and security challenges and seeks to claim its place among the largest and most prestigious AI and robotics competitions in the world.
The Challenge is open to international universities, research institutions, companies and individual innovators from all over the world. It will involve a heterogeneous collaboration among unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned surface vehicles, to perform complex navigation and manipulation tasks in a GNSS-denied environment.
Commenting on the announcement, Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary-General of ATRC, said: “We are proud that MBZIRC is going global by inviting the best talent from all over the world to participate. We have set a tough real-world challenge that will push the participants to the limits of their capabilities.”
The challenge will show how both entities focus on niche areas of technology, while attracting global innovators to stimulate ideas, encourage collaboration, and push boundaries in advanced technologies to find systems solutions to global challenges.
Dr Arthur Morrish, Chief Executive of ASPIRE, said: “For countries with long coastlines, ensuring maritime safety requires significant investment in sophisticated equipment and highly trained personnel. Using advanced robotic systems can not only help reduce costs, but also handle some of the often-dangerous tasks performed by humans.
“The motivation for holding the MBZIRC Maritime Grand Challenge is to take the technology out of the laboratory and test it in a real-world environment to see what is possible.”
Dr Morrish underscored the two-fold purpose behind the competition: one is to focus on the important problems in autonomy of robotics, while engaging the world community in a hard robotics challenge. The other is to find a solution to a real-world challenge facing the world.
The challenge is for a swarm of UAVs to identify a target vessel from several similar vessels in open waters in a GNSS-denied environment, and to offload specific items from the target onto an USV in the shortest possible time using autonomous technologies. This is a new kind of exercise in autonomous robotics.
“A nice thing about this challenge is that you tell people what you want, but you don’t specify an approach to do it,” Dr Morrish added.
In line with its efforts to build Abu Dhabi’s R&D ecosystem, ASPIRE will design several grand challenges and international competitions in advanced technology to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. ASPIRE also works in consultation with cross-sector industry stakeholders, universities, and research institutes to frame problem statements.
