Lowering the Entry Barrier to Aerial Robotics Competitions

The introduction of autonomous aerial robots in everyday applications has motivated the emergence of multiple competitions, which propose unique challenges to the research community. At the same time, robotic competitions are excellent opportunities to engage engineering students and improve their skills, and also end users to adopt the newest technologies. However, the high effort that teams must devote prevents the broad participation of the research community. Thus, this has motivated the arrival of dataset-based competitions in which teams do not need to integrate and operate an actual aerial robotic system. Nevertheless, succeeding in these offline challenges does not ensure that real robots will work as expected, hence limiting the impact of the developments. We propose a comprehensive strategy to maximize team participation by recording and providing real datasets in the same environment where the competitions take place. The publicly available datasets can be accessed at https://github.com/fada-catec/rami_dataset.