Overview

The Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC) is organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The focus of ARIAC is to test the agility of industrial robots with the goal of enabling these platforms on shop floors to be more productive, autonomous, and to require less time from workers. Robot agility is defined as the following: (i) detecting failures in a manufacturing process and automatically recovering from those failures; (ii) automated planning to minimize (or eliminate) up-front robot programming time when a new product is introduced; (iii) coping with fixtureless environments where a robot can sense and perform tasks on parts that are not in predefined locations; (iv) plug and play robots where robots from different manufacturers can be swapped in and out without the need for reprogramming. Participants in ARIAC are required to develop robot system software to control a robot in a simulated environment. Judging criteria involves the overall performance based on scoring metrics and the novelty of the approach.

Contributions

• We were (5th place) finalists in ARIAC 2021
• We were (3rd place) finalists in ARIAC 2022
• We were (4th place) finalists in ARIAC 2023