Real Robot Challenge

Experimentation on real robots is very costly in terms of time and money. For this reason, a large part of the reinforcement learning community uses simulators, such as those available through OpenAI Gym, to develop and benchmark algorithms. However, insights gained in simulation do not necessarily translate to real robots, in particular for tasks involving complex interaction with the environment.

The purpose of this competition is to alleviate this problem by allowing participants to experiment on a real robot as easily as on a simulator. As tasks, we propose a number of dexterous manipulation problems, such as pushing, grasping, flipping and spinning objects. We developed robot hardware and software which is suitable for this setup. The robots will be hosted at our institute and participants will execute their algorithms remotely, through a convenient and simple interface.

Ossama Ahmed
Ossama Ahmed
Senior Robotics Research Engineer