• The facilities of the Center for Advanced Aerospace Technologies (CATEC) will host the European Robotics League (ERL) – Emergency Service Robots tournament from the 18-23 February 2019.
• Thanks to this event it will be possible to improve the work in rescue operations, natural disasters, or fires, among other actions; and test in realistic scenarios the latest innovations and robotic applications that are being developed in this robotics field.
• During ERL Emergency 2019, there will be special prizes awarded by the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (GSA) and the SESAR Joint Undertaking.  
• The challenges of the robots of the participating teams will focus on aspects such as outdoor/indoor autonomous navigation, obstacle detection and avoidance, object recognition, or accurate delivery of items.

The Center for Advanced Aerospace Technologies (CATEC) will host the II Local Tournament on the ERL Emergency Service Robots challenge of the European Robotics League (ERL), to be held from the 18-23 February 2019. This event will bring together technology and research centers and international entities linked to the application and use of robots and unmanned systems (drones) in emergency situations.

The ERL is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme and comprises different local tournaments held in different European cities. Teams participate with their robots in at least two tournaments per season, obtaining scores based on their performances.

The ERL Emergency Service Robots challenge aims to facilitate and improve the work performed in rescue operations, natural disasters, or fires, among other actions. The use of robots minimises the risk and danger that this type of actions entail for the people or professionals who take care of them. In the case of emergencies, robotic systems play a key role by enabling rescue teams to sense and act at a distance from the emergency site. The robotics competition will showcase the latest innovations and robotic applications that are being developed in this field by the international scientific community.

The European Robotics League (ERL) aims to develop diverse tasks benchmarks that the participating robots must execute in outdoor/indoor real environments.

The II ERL Emergency local tournament will focus on fostering advanced developments on autonomous capabilities and seamless outdoor/indoor navigation for air and land robots in applications related to emergency actions.

Teams participating in the ERL Emergency 2019 tournament will demonstrate and perform tasks and functionality benchmarks focused on aspects such as outdoor/indoor autonomous navigation, obstacle detection and avoidance, object recognition and locate missing persons, high speed flying or accurate delivery of items such as first aid kits.

The scores of the two best participations of each team in each tournament add to their ranking result and final classification. The prizes to the best team of the Emergency league will be awarded during the European Robotics Forum (ERF) to be held in March 2019 in Bucharest (Romania). 

GSA Prize

During ERL Emergency 2019, there will be a special prize awarded by the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (GSA). A special task has been devised to assess positioning accuracy of robots that make use of solutions based on Galileo and EGNOS.  This challenge includes two kinds of tasks for aerial robots: horizontal accuracy in landings at a specific geographic coordinate and vertical accuracy while hovering at a specific geographic coordinate.

 SESAR Prize

SESAR Joint Undertaking will award a prize recognising technological innovations to ensure the safe access to airspace for drones or aerial robots, in support of the European Commission’s U-space initiative.

For this purpose, a special working group has been established in which selected teams can demonstrate that their technology has been devised to benchmark high levels of autonomy in aerial robots, in the context of U-space for the safe access to airspace for aerial robots. Specifically, functionalities related to detect and avoid will be assessed using only on-board sensors. To achieve these objectives, aerial robots equipped with the competing technologies should complete a track test where there will be static obstacles and other non-cooperative robots present. Each aerial robot will be required to cross several waypoints without colliding against any obstacle and also detect and avoid non-cooperative drones, without the intervention of a human operator.The more obstacles and non-cooperative drones the aerial robot detects and avoids, the more points the team will get. The team that achieves the best result will be the winner. To compete for the award, the team must have executed valid trials of the track. This prize will only be awarded if SESAR representatives consider that team’s performance is excellent.

Teams from universities and research and technology centers that want to participate in the II Local Tournament on the ERL Emergency Robots Challenge in Seville, Spain, must register from September 15 to October 29 at https://sites.google.com/catec.aero/erl-emergency-2019. Applicant teams can ask for more information or solve any doubts contacting to the following email  erl.emergency@catec.aero.   

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FADA-CATEC’s press office:

Celia Ruiz +34 954 62 27 27

Notes for editors

FADA-CATEC

CATEC is an advanced technology center that contributes to the improving the competitiveness of aerospace companies in the aerospace sector, through scientific research, technology transfer and advanced services. It is also supported by the Andalusian Foundation for Aerospace Development (FADA), and it is a unique private center in Spain for its wide technological capabilities and highly skilled workforce of more than 60 specialists and technicians.

CATEC has become one of the most active technology centers in national and European R&D projects, standing out specifically in fields like Unmanned Aero

Systems (UAS/RPAS), Robotics and in the development of solutions for Industry 4.0 or Factory of the Future. It counts on a team of over 20 engineers and technicians working in this area, and it has participated or participates in over 30 projects related to UAS, including European programs like the VII Programme Framework and Horizon 2020 Programmes of the European Commission and the SESAR initiative.

The European Robotics League

The European Robotics League (ERL) is the successor to the RoCKIn, euRathlon and EuRoC robotics competitions, funded by the EU and designed to foster scientific progress and innovation in cognitive systems and robotics. The ERL comprises annual competitions for Consumer, Professional and Emergency Service Robots, and a biennial robotics challenge for Smart Cities. See: www.robotics-league.eu

SciRoc

The European Robotics League is run by the SciRoc project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme under grant agreement n° 780086.

SciRoc continues to build the ERL; raising interest through public engagement, validating and disseminating new benchmarks, and accelerating development through demonstrating the performance of components and techniques against these benchmarks.  Setting the competitions in a Smart City context drives development towards real societal needs. See: sciroc.eu

SPARC

The ERL is part of the SPARC public-private partnership set up by the European Commission and the euRobotics association to extend Europe’s leadership in civilian robotics. SPARC’s €700 million of funding from the Commission in 2014–20 is being combined with €1.4 billion of funding from European industry.  See: old.eu-robotics.net/sparc