Robot Orienteering

You will participate in The EarthRover Challenge, part of ICRA 2025 robotics conference. In this competition the participants have to guide teleoperated robots in various cities over the world to pass given GPS waypoints. The robots are controlled remotely by AI using Earth Rovers SDK. As everything is happening remotely, you are not restricted by robot hardware or compute capabilities. All the software runs in your own laptop (or cloud) and any machine learning model can be used.

The Earth Rover Challenge organizers will give us three robots to run locally near Delta. Additionally we will be given access token to control any fleet robot in the world. You should keep in mind that during the competition the missions are in different cities (mainly US, South America and Canada), so do not overfit to Tartu. You can test drive a robot here. Training data for machine learning models can be found here.

Important dates

Date	Description	Location
11.02.2025 12:15	First meeting	Delta Room 2006
...	IRL Training (20hrs/week/team)	remote
31.03.2025	Practice session I	remote
15.04.2025	Practice session II	remote
30.04.2025	Practice session III	remote
19.05.2025	Dry run on site	Atlanta, USA or remote
20-21.05.2025	Main competition	Atlanta, USA or remote
30.05.2025	Write a blog post or report of your experience

Prerequisites

• Good command of Python
• Experience with machine vision
• Some familiarity with robotics

Deliverables

To earn 3 ECTS your team must:

• Meaningfully participate in the competition, i.e. participate at least one practice session and the final competition.
• Write a blog post or report of your experience.

Bonus:

• If from practice sessions it seems that your team is a plausible candidate for top 3, ADL will pay for the trip to Atlanta, USA.

Contact(s)

Course instructor(s):

• Tambet Matiisen, tambet.matiisen@ut.ee
• Anish Shrestha, anish.shrestha@ut.ee

Tambet and Anish can be found in Autonomous Driving Lab (room 3095 in Delta, behind Sandbox).