On August 25th, the 2023 Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC) , organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the United States, unveiled its competition outcomes. The Reaper team from the Industrial Control Network and System Department at the Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), won the championship for the third consecutive year.
This competition aimed to improve the adaptability and agility of industrial robot clusters in complex manufacturing tasks. Challenges included part sorting, logistics, assembly, quality control, and dealing with various issues like defective parts, dynamic orders, robot failures, and safety concerns.
The Reaper team proposed an integrated intelligent control system based on scene awareness for scheduling and control. This system not only efficiently allocated tasks to multiple robots but also enhanced the robots' autonomous decision-making capabilities. Through collaborative optimization of scheduling and control decisions, it simplified complex task processes, enabled autonomous planning of robot actions in dynamic scenarios, and improved the system's dynamic reconfigurability. The Reaper team excelled in 10 dynamic test scenarios, securing the championship with a perfect technical score and a high evaluation for their system architecture.
NIST is the United States' national research agency for fundamental and applied research in physics, biology, engineering, as well as research in measurement technology and testing methods. ARIAC is an international competition organized by NIST to promote the development of AI-driven reconfigurable flexible automation systems under the new wave of industrial revolutions, including Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet. Since 2017, ARIAC has attracted over 100 teams from prestigious universities and research institutions worldwide. Notably, the Reaper team has consistently secured the championship for three consecutive years since their participation in the competition.
