Objective

The objective of the Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC) is to test the agility of industrial robot systems, with the goal of enabling industrial robots on the shop floors to be more productive, more autonomous, and to require less time from shop floor workers. In this context, we define agility broadly to address:

• Failure identification and recovery, where robot can detect failures in a manufacturing process and automatically recover from those failures
• Automated planning, to minimize (or eliminate) the up-front robot programming time when a new product is introduced
• Fixtureless environment, where robots can sense the environment and perform tasks on parts that are not in predefined locations
• Plug and play robots, where robots from different manufacturers can be swapped in and out without the need for reprogramming

The competition is a simulation-based contest designed to encourage robot agility research, as well as facilitate technology transfer.

The objectives of the workshop are the following:

•  Describe the overall goal of the competition, how it was implemented, and information about the teams that participated
•  Describe the ARIAC simulation environments, challenge problems, and metrics
• Present the results from the first competition and associated findings
•  Provide a venue for the teams to describe their approaches to address the challenges
• Describe lessons learned from the competition and get feedback from the participants
• Determine the direction for future competitions, though presentations from industry and feedback from the community
• Provide a forum for other teams to get involved in the competition, by learning from existing teams and the ability to get trained on the software via a hands-on tutorial at the end of the workshop.