ICRA 2022, the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference took place in Philadelphia at the end of May. There were 8K participants from 97 countries with 4.7K of them attending in-person.

Now in its 39th year ICRA brings together the world's top researchers and most important companies to share ideas and advances in the field of robotics. As a post-pandemic event ICRA 2022 welcomed 96 partners and exhibitors, held 56 workshops, 6 forums and 10 networking events and there were 1,498 paper presentations.

But it wasn't people who were the stars of the show but rather the robots themselves - see how many you recognize on the cat walk, videoed by Bram Vanderborght.

Ten major competitions were held during ICRA 2022. Those for student teams included:

BARN (Benchmark Autonomous Robot) Challenge - aims at evaluating state-of-the-art autonomous navigation systems to move robots through highly constrained environments in a safe and efficient manner. The task is to navigate a standardized Clearpath Jackal robot from a predefined start to a goal location as quickly as possible without any collision both in the simulated BARN dataset and in physical obstacle courses.

RoboMaster University AI Challenge - focuses on the application of mobile robotics algorithms in an integrated context. Teams need to master multiple aspects of algorithm knowledge, such as positioning, motion planning, target detection, autonomous decision-making and automatic control. In RMUA 2022, automatic robots from both sides (2V2)  shot against each other in a rune-filled battlefield. Teams used the official platform to conduct motion planning, control and autonomous decision making by sensing the battlefield and the fully autonomous robots  launched projectiles against the enemy. 

10th F1TENTH Autonomous Grand Prix - teams participating in this event had already built a 1:10 scaled autonomous race car according to a given specification and written software for it to fulfill the objectives for the competition in which they raced head-to-head. The organizers provided the race setup (rules, submissions, guidelines), the track, related infrastructure and organize the race itself.

DodgeDrone: Vision-Based Agile Drone Flight - pushing the boundaries of drone navigation, participants  develop perception and control algorithms to navigate a drone in both static and dynamic environments:

The FIRST LEGO League Challenge for teams of students in Grades 4 - 8 also took place at ICRA 2022 with FIRST LEGO League Challenge Teams competing with their robots in three matches and also being judged on the innovation of their robot designs.

Hopefully the youngsters who participated will be inspired to become the next generation of roboticists.  

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