The RAMI competition

RAMI competition aims at addressing Inspection and Maintenance (I&M) tasks achieved by aerial and underwater robots:

• offering the possibility of increasing the spatial/temporal resolution of the inspection process,
• improving the operation persistency and the quality of the acquired data,
• potentially reducing operational costs and
• increasing the safety of workers, especially in dangerous areas, such as explosive atmosphere (ATEX) environments, or works at height.

To tackle the different challenges of the I&M sector, and increase the added value of using robots, it is key to increase their autonomy level. A high degree of autonomy is especially required when a direct link with an operator cannot be guaranteed, or when it is required to perform inspection tasks in a repetitive way. Autonomous decisions can also increase the robot mission performance and guarantee robot survival in hostile or cluttered environments, where it is difficult to teleoperate robots safely.

It has been identified that the most promising applications in the I&M sector require the use of aerial and underwater robots due to the risks and costs associated with work at height or underwater inspection performed by human operators. Therefore, the RAMI competition will focus on these two types of robots, to push the state of the art in terms of autonomy navigation and performance.

The evaluation process of RAMI competitions will mainly involve tasks related to autonomous navigation and data acquisition for I&M purposes. Since aerial and underwater domains are very different, both domains will be evaluated separately in two different tracks.

• Aerial domain tasks will be organised by CATEC, the Advanced Center for Aerospace Technologies
• Underwater domain tasks will be monitored by CMRE, the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation

Both will conduct the competition evaluations in realistic environments of interest for I&M end-users.

RAMI CAMPAIGNS

2023 RAMI Aerial Campaigns

The second edition of RAMI evaluation campaigns for aerial robots, to be held in conjunction with the International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS) 2023. In this edition, the competition is taking place in two subsequent stages. First, the cascade evaluation campaign will run from January to April 2023, where teams will develop and test their algorithms on datasets provided by CATEC. Then, the teams with the best performances will be allowed to participate in the field evaluation campaign, which will take place at the ICUAS conference venue in June 2023 in Warsaw, Poland.

2nd RAMI Field Campaign for Marine Robots

The 2nd RAMI Marine Robots competition that will be held at the NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia, Italy, 16 ‒ 21 July 2023. The competition will challenge the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) of participant teams to accomplish Inspection & Maintenance tasks set in the CMRE protected seawater basin. AUVs will require perception, manipulation, adaptive mission planning and autonomous navigation skills to be successful.

Second edition of RAMI evaluation campaigns for aerial robots 2023

The second edition of RAMI evaluation campaigns for aerial robots, to be held in conjunction with the International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS) 2023. In this edition, the competition will take place in two subsequent stages. First, the cascade evaluation campaign will run from January to April 2023, where teams will develop and test their algorithms on datasets provided by CATEC. Then, the teams with the best performances will be allowed to participate in the field evaluation campaign, which will take place at the ICUAS conference venue in June 2023 in Warsaw, Poland.

1st Aerial Field Campaign

The first Field Campaign for Aerial Robots of the RAMI Competition will be held at the Advanced Center for Aerospace Technologies (CATEC) in Seville, Spain, in October 17-21, 2022. This competition aims to test the skills of the proposed aerial robotic solutions in tasks such as precise autonomous navigation, and automatic defect detection with advanced AI algorithms, while operating in a GNSS-denied environment.

1st Marine Cascade Campaign

The first edition of METRICS RAMI Cascade Evaluation Campaign for Marine Robots. This competition will take place fully virtually using data generated during previous RAMI campaigns. The competition is open to everyone all around the world and is led by NATO STO CMRE (Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, La Spezia, Italy), one of the reference research centres in Europe devoted to marine robotics technologies. Teams could register for participation by October 10, 2022 and submit their Docker images by October 30, 2022. 

1st Marine Physical Campaign

The first RAMI Marine Robots competition was held at the NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia, Italy, 10 ‒ 15 July 2022. The competition did challenge the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) of participant teams to accomplish Inspection & Maintenance tasks set in the CMRE protected seawater basin. AUVs required perception, manipulation, adaptive mission planning and autonomous navigation skills to be successful. Results are available at the campaign webpage.

1st Aerial Cascade Campaign

The first edition of METRICS RAMI competition for aerial robots, was held in conjunction with IROS 2021 (September 27th – October 1st). This competition will take place fully virtually using data generated during previous RAMI campaigns. The competition is open to everyone all around the world and is led by CATEC (Advanced Center for Aerospace Technologies, Seville, Spain), one of the reference research centres in Europe devoted to aerial robotic technologies. Result are available at the campaign's webpage.

Dry-run Campaign

During the month of March 2021, the RAMI dry-run campaign has been carried out. The dry-run campaign has allowed the validation of the evaluation procedure defined in the RAMI Evaluation Plan.

The dry-run execution involved most of the aspects of the RAMI Competition, both for underwater and aerial robots, allowing to:

• Validate the design of the TBMs and the FBMs in a real setting.
• Test the scoring and metrics system proposed for the Field and Cascade Campaigns.
• Assess the feasibility of performing the proposed Tasks and Functionalities by the future competing teams.

_________

The RAMI evaluation plan available below describes the competition and its evaluation and will be continuously updated. Additional information will be posted here as well.