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.
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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.