The 2010 MAGIC Robotics Competition

The MAGIC 2010 robotics competition asks teams of robots to collaboratively map an urban area, find and "catch" bad guys, and identify and "neutralize" bombs. The robots must do this almost entirely autonomously, presenting a variety of challenging perception, state estimation, and multi-agent adversarial planning problems. A unique twist to the contest is that a human is available to help the robot team, however, human interventions are steeply penalized.

We are leading a team to compete in this challenge. In this talk, I will describe the contest along with some of our half-baked ideas and preliminary results. Your feedback, ideas, and pointers will be greatly appreciated.