Shared benchmark problems have historically been a fundamental driver of progress for scientific communities. In the context of academic conferences, competitions offer the opportunity to researchers with different origins, backgrounds, and levels of seniority to quantitatively compare their ideas. In robotics, a hot and challenging topic is sim2real-porting approaches that work well in simulation to real robot hardware. In our case, creating a hybrid competition with both simulation and real robot components was also dictated by the uncertainties around travel and logistics in the post-COVID-19 world. Hence, this article motivates and describes an aerial sim2real robot competition that ran during the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, from the specification of the competition task, to the details of the software infrastructure supporting simulation and real-life experiments, to the approaches of the top-placed teams and the lessons learned by participants and organizers.

Canopy CMO Yaron Litwin discusses how criminals are using deepfake technology to blackmail teens and generate child pornography. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced a competition for companies to provide new artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to help identify and seal holes in national cybersecurity. "In the AI Cyber Challenge, our goal is to again create this kind of new ecosystem with a diverse set of creative cyber competitors, empowered by the country's top AI firms, all pointed at new ways to secure the software infrastructure that underlies our economy," DARPA Outreach told Fox News Digital. "Ultimately, we want to see the best and the brightest cybersecurity, computer science, program analysis and AI and machine learning from across industry and academia come together to participate in this challenge." DARPA announced the challenge at Black Hat USA 2023, calling the competition the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), which will last two years and involve multiple rounds of qualification and competition for a $4 million prize.

Disney, Lucasfilm and FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) have joined forces to inspire the next generation of innovators. In this year's sports and fitness-themed season, students across the globe will compete in robotics challenges, exploring what it means to be'forces for change'. The ongoing collaboration with FIRST allows Disney and Lucasfilm to expand access to science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) learning to more young people. Star Wars: Force for Change is a philanthropic initiative providing students with financial, in-kind and mentorship resources. Walt Disney Imagineering has provided sponsorship and mentorship to FIRST for more than two decades, offering educational opportunities featuring the characters, stories and experiences of Star Wars.

Tedrake, a robotics researcher at MIT, has taken part in the challenge, and describes how hard it is to even get a robot in a car. What do you think about RoboSimian and its smooth yet creepy way of exiting a vehicle? And how do you think "Clyde" compares to Boston Dynamics' Atlas? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

This weekend, nine teams of robots (and their humans) will make their way to the Edgar Experimental Mine in Idaho Springs, Colo. DARPA SubT is a challenge on a similar scale to DARPA's incredible Robotics Challenge that took place in 2015--a series of competitions based on real-world needs, attracting some of the best roboticists in the world with sophisticated robotic hardware to match. The integration exercise (which is closed to anyone but the participating teams, we definitely asked) is just the first step in a challenge that will involve both a virtual competition and a competition for physical systems, each with multiple circuits culminating in a final that wraps everything together into one epic event. Some teams will get over US $4 million in DARPA funding, and the prize pool for the finals is up to $2 million. We'll be following SubT through multiple stages all the way until the final event, which is schedule for August of 2021.

I can't sit here and guarantee you a robot won't take your job one day--capitalism kind of has a thing for automation. What I can tell you is that in the near future, robots will be doing jobs that no one wants to do. Which is why for its next robotics competition, Darpa is going underground, with the Darpa Subterranean Challenge. If you don't remember, that's the same far-out federal research agency that put on the Grand Challenge (which helped kick off the self-driving car revolution), and the Robotics Challenge (which helped get humanoids walking among us). And now it's calling on researchers to autonomously explore the innards of Earth.

For robots to successfully perceive and understand their environment, they must be taught to act in a goal-directed way. While mapping environments geometry is a necessary prerequisite for many mobile robot applications, understanding the semantics of the environment will enable novel applications, which require more advanced cognitive abilities. Sven Behnke, Head of Autonomous Intelligent Systems Group at the University of Bonn, is tackling this area of robotics by combining dense geometric modelling and semantic categorization. Through this, 3D semantic maps of the environment are built. Sven's team have demonstrated the utility of semantic environment perception with cognitive robots in multiple challenging application domains, including domestic service, space exploration, search and rescue, and bin picking.

You could argue that the door handle has had a disproportionate influence on modern robotics. It was the humanoids of the Darpa Robotics Challenge, after all, that were tasked with opening doors, and it was those machines that helped drive robots to where they are now. Today Boston Dynamics posted a video of its SpotMini quadruped robot extending an arm out of its head to turn a handle. With the dexterity of a tray-carrying butler, it uses its foot to prop the door ajar, then elbows it all the way open for its (armless) SpotMini friend to walk through. But it's also an interesting twist in the quest to make robots that get along with a world built by and for humans. Maybe the Darpa Robotics Challenge had it wrong with humanoids after all, and the best robots for rescue operations will look nothing like humans--or any other animal, for that matter.

Even in retirement, Chimp the robot's still got it. The giant red humanoid crouches down like a Transformer to roll on all fours, then stands up and slowly approaches a door. It sees its world by coating it in lasers, allowing Chimp to reach for the handle, delicately turn it, and roll through the entry. Two and a half years after Chimp competed in the Darpa Robotics Challenge, it remains one of the weirdest humanoid robots on Earth. But that weirdness is Chimp's strength.

In the meantime, if one of them goes berserk, here's a useful tactic: Shut the door behind you. One after another, robots in a government-sponsored contest were stumped by an unlocked door that blocked their path at an outdoor obstacle course. One bipedal machine managed to wrap a claw around the door handle and open it but was flummoxed by a breeze that kept blowing the door shut before it could pass through. Robots excel at many tasks, as long as they don't involve too much hand-eye coordination or common sense. Like some gifted children, they can perform impressive feats of mental arithmetic but are profoundly klutzy on the playground.