Hello fellow engineers!

This year we are preparing something special for you! A comeback of an ERC Remote formula – this time on Husarion Panther and Husarion Lynx platforms – perfect matches for an outdoor Marsyard environment!

Our main goal for this year is to figure out an interesting set of task classes for remote competitions to come. This is why we will be providing you with an extensive description **that may change along the way** as we both learn what works and what doesn’t. Due to us being a company, we’ll also be sneaking in some of the actually useful parts of corporate/industry practices – which hopefully will help you after your journey through the education systems around the world. We also understand that teams for such competition may need to be created from scratch – that’s why we’ve made the tasks slightly more vague and fun rather than strict and challenging. That does not mean however that you won’t need knowledge from a vast variety of topics. We still want you to collaborate a lot and assemble teams that are perfectly capable of running in both the remote and on site competition formulas.

Enough introduction, let’s talk about some dates first.

The main remote competition will take place right before the onsite competition. Competition finals will be held on the exact same Marsyard for both formulas. Keep in mind that we won’t be providing any accommodation for the teams running both formulas during that time, and participating in remote formula physically from a close proximity of Marsyard will be prohibited.

Before the competition we’re planning several Test drives – not only to let you familiarize with the robots and environment, but also let us learn about the teams and competition’s progression. During most of the test drives you’ll be able to score points – which will be both counted for a final score and used to qualify for the following Test drive. Unfortunately Marsyard won’t be ready for us during the Test drives (at least for most of them) so each of the drives will have a specific theme, focusing on things like connectivity, machine learning, interaction with judges and so on, in a substitute location. Test drives will be held roughly every 1-2 months, during which each of the teams will have full access to the environment, robot and judges for half to one hour at a time.

The tasks? Let’s hear a story first…

…your mission was given a lander with two robots. One large, with a comprehensive set of sensors (Husarion Panther) and one small and nimble ideal for mixed indoor and outdoor applications (Husarion Lynx). The lander will be equipped with some computing power too – so you can host your expensive algorithms there. The gist of the mission is to investigate an old expedition crash site and figure out whether you can find a path through the hazardous waste scattered all over the place.

Your first task will be to investigate the crash site (ideally but not necessarily autonomously) using Husarion Panther and provide us with a report of what you’ve found. Such reports should be human readable, as comprehensive as possible and provided right after completing the task. We do encourage you to use machine learning and large language models extensively for this task. Your team should ideally have experience in machine learning, autonomous navigation, computer vision and planetary-geology.

The second task will be divided into a couple of smaller tasks (done ideally through teleoperation assisted by a couple of algorithms) executed on Husarion Lynx – you’ll be trying to navigate around the hazardous waste (most likely ultra wideband tags under the hood in this case) to reach a specified destination. In order to help you with this task you’ll be given an opportunity to download locations of hazardous materials in advance by completing a sequence of tasks in a safe area. There will be a habitat with a microcontroller (that you’ll be writing firmware for) used to control its airlock. There will also be an equipment panel with a similar microcontroller and you’ll be writing a firmware for it too. Its role will be to read “the admin password” from some external system and transmit, using available gauges and LEDs to the robot’s camera – so you’ll essentially be creating a visual communication protocol. There will be extra points for the effectiveness of the transmission. With such a password you’ll be able to ask our system for locations of hazardous materials already registered by the existing equipment. For this task you’ll most likely need an electronics engineer, embedded firmware developer, ROS developer and some UI skills. Being handy in teleoperation will also help.

The exact task rules and scopes of the test runs will be published in the following weeks – right now we only wanted to spice up your imagination and give you a rough list of technical competences that your team needs to acquire.

When it comes to the non-technical skills – most of them are totally up to you. We won’t be requiring as much documentation and materials as in the onsite formula. We will basically want a high level plan for the competition, together with a list of skills you have (not necessarily by other robotic competitions but in general) at the beginning, and a retro (agile retrospective) from your point of view – both about your own performance and the competition itself – right after the main competition.

We also want to promote healthy competition and community work. In the following weeks we will set up a community forum intended for you to ask questions and provide materials that will benefit both you and other teams. Healthy interactions there will be rewarded with points in the general scoring.

Registration and formalities

The remote formula registration is planned to open on February 24th, 2025.

In the following weeks we will be slowly publishing more materials, like the official rulebook, technical handbook (with exact specifications of the robots used for competition), registration forms and so on. We’re sure plenty of you already have some questions – please refrain from using any old communication channels and let us provide you with more data and setup the community forum first.

We hope that this announcement sparked your interest. The task for us would be to prepare more documentation and a task for you would be to start assembling teams.

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