Why a Mobot Race?

An autonomous robotic agent consists of a real physical artifact that includes perception, action, and reasoning capabilities. The robot needs to be able to perceive features of the world and to navigate towards the achievement of its goals. Building an autonomous robotic agent is a challenging task of great interest to the advance of the scientific areas of robotics and artificial intelligence.

The Mobot competition is designed to allow the participants to explore some of the main technical aspects involved in building an autonomous robotic agent. Concretely, in the Mobot competition, the robot needs to follow a white line on the ground outdoors along a specific path. This task includes a set of technical difficulties, including the mechanical construction of the robot to allow for outdoors navigation on non-flat terrain; the development of robot sensors to robustly detect the relevant features of the task, in particular the white line; and reasoning rules that allow the robot to select the appropriate actions. Participants in the competition successfully acquire on-hands research experience in this full range of scientific challenges.