Both the EURON roadmap and the FP7 ICT Challenge 2 on Cognitive Systems, Interaction and Robotics suggest the importance on benchmarking Cognitive Robotic Systems. In particular ICT Challenge 2 specifically addresses the idea of autonomy: Artificial systems that can achieve general goals in a largely unsupervised way, and persevere under adverse or uncertain conditions; adapt, within reasonable constraints, to changing service and performance requirements, without the need for external re-programming, re-configuring, or re-adjusting.
In the first half of 2007 a number of informal meetings and discussions on benchmarks for cognitive robots were held, taking advantage of related events. Several actions were considered resulting in the organization of a number of events specifically focused on cognitive or intelligent robots, namely:
The common motivation of these workshops was to promote a capability-led understanding of cognitive robots: how to define shared ontologies to discuss robotic cognitive systems in terms of their performance, relationships between different cognitive robotics capabilities, requirements, theories, architectures, models and methods that can be applied across multiple engineering and application domains, detailing and understanding better the requirements for robots in terms of performance, the approaches to meeting these requirements and the trade-offs in terms of performance. Another important point to discuss was the distinction between autonomy and intelligence (if any) and how one influences the other.
In this regard, the ICEA project (funded by IST Cognitive Systems) has organized a contest to promote research results and stimulate further interest in bio-inspired cognitive robotics. The participation to the contest is open to anyone and free of charge. Contestants can download a free version of the Webots software for simulating a robotic scenario where two rat robots compete against each other for survival in a maze-like environment. The developed robot controllers can be transfered in real e-puck robots roaming an interactive LEGO maze.
Rat's Life is a complete cognitive robotics benchmark that was carefully designed to be easily reproductible in a research lab with limited resources.
The real setup relies on two e-puck robots, some LEGO bricks while the simulation setup relies on the Webots robot simulation software. This benchmark is a survival game where two robots compete against each other for resources in an unknown maze. Like the rats in cognitive animal experimentation, the e-puck robots look for feeders which allow them to live longer than their opponent. Once a feeder is reached by a robot, the robot draws energy from it and the feeder becomes unavailable for a while. Hence, the robot has to further explore the maze, searching for other feeders while remembering the way back to the first ones. This allows them to be able to refuel easily again and again and hopefully live longer than their opponent.
The e-puck robots are equipped with several sensors, including a camera, 8 distance sensors and a 3D accelerometer. Developing a robot controller requires basic programming skills in Java language. Different approaches can be investigated and combined with each other, including robot control, image processing, landmark based navigation, self localization and mapping (SLAM), game strategy, autonomy management, AI, learning, etc.
The contest started on January 7th, 2008 and terminates on June 30th, 2008. During this period, the contest remains open to new competitors. Every business day, a contest round is executed so that every competitor will face at least one opponent and the general ranking is updated. All the matches of a round are immediately visible online from the contest web site.
Participation to the Rat's Life contest is totally free of charge and doesn't require the purchase of any product or service. To enter the contest, the participant has to register on the website, download and install the demo version of the Webots software, program your robot controller and submit your code on the contest web site.
More information can be found here.