Finals qualification list

Announcements
1

Okay, we’re past the Competition Demo, time for a couple of updates.

First of all, the following Teams have been qualified to the Final Challenge:

  • Sapienza Technology Team
  • IITB Mars Rover Team
  • CRISS Robotics
  • SHUNYA
  • TerraBots

Congratulations!

Secondly, you’ll find all the recent results and updates in commit Finals announcement · husarion/erc2025@e645b64 · GitHub. Also, we’d like to thank all of you that have not qualified for the Finals - it was wonderful to be able to meet you and see your developments. We sincerely hope that the materials you’ve prepared for this Competition will be helpful to your studies/careers and that you were able to grow during this Competition. If you have any feedback - please submit a Competition Report by the time specified below - we’d like to hear what was your experience.

Next, a couple of housekeeping reminders so the remaining steps go smoothly:

  • Finals will be held on Tuesday (26th), at the hours specified here erc2025/phase_5/finals_announcement.md at main · husarion/erc2025 · GitHub. Time Slots will be 1 hour per Team.
  • Please remember about the Competition Reports - we’d like to get them before the end of Wednesday, so it’d make some sense to start preparing them early (i.e. in regard to the parts of the Competition before Finals)
  • We will stop awarding Social Excellence points by the end of Monday - a day before the Finals, so please submit all of your works, community outreach, sponsor interaction reports, etc by that time.
  • If you feel that you should have been awarded some Social Excellence (or other points) but are unable to find a record of it in the repository - please let us know in this thread. We tried to reply with a proper comment about the points each time we’ve awarded them but we may have missed something.
  • If any of the Teams that have not qualified wants to download some data from their VM before it’s removal - now it’s the time. We will let them run for a day or so and then remove them so we can max the resources for the Finals. Qualified Teams - please expect VMs to be rebooted/migrated and expanded after that.

Finally a couple of hints, about the most popular issues you’ve faced during the last Test:

  • Most of you have not added the IP addres of your VM to your cyclonedds.xml. This have resulted in not being able to see topics published by the nodes running on your VMs - while being completely fine for most of the ros2router setups. Please tune that file to your specific needs.
  • Plenty of you have not updated your configs based on the reference ones thus faced the same issues as before. Let me reiterate that: we’re updating the reference configs, but we’re not updating the actual configs (as plenty of you already have some tweaks in them).
  • A reminder that in case you need some more significant changes on your VM you can request them by opening a Pull Request in the competition repository proposing some changes in Ansible files.
  • One painful observation that we had was that most of you did not have any contingencies neither ready nor planned. Most of you tried to get the full autonomy running to the last second, even though you’ve already had enough interfaces set up for a manual (or semi-manual) runs. Remember that during the Competition you are allowed to have multiple runs. You only need to inform the Judges about the currently pursued mode and also remember to clear the environment of the current run (i.e. you can do a manual run, then an autonomous run, decide that autonomous was not good enough, create a report based on the data from manual run and send us that report, but you cannot use any data from manual run to neither help the autonomous run, nor it’s report generation. Multiple runs of the same level are fine, as long as they don’t share any recorded data either).
  • Extending the previous point - during the last two Test Drives we tried to extract any useful development data from you, as a “last resort” so we can at least give you some points. While re-submitting reports that were already scored is not an option, we encourage you to have some sort of a “backup plan” in a form of screenshots/screencasts from the development between the Test Drive and the Finals. Such materials can help you only in case you had a really bad run/technical issues/etc, but they are one of the few things that you can prepare beforehand and help you score. Have in mind that there will be no reschedules and second Time Framesfor the Finals - Marsyard is already booked for the Onsite Formula.
  • Cameras worked fine outdoor on an extremely sunny day. Angles were not so great but we have adjustable mounts for them now - feel free to request angle changes if you need them. FOVs could be better but for the sake of not changing things constantly - they’ll stay. Bitrate/FPS seemed like a decent tradeoff between the reliability of the connection and realistic movement speeds for autonomous operation.
  • Lidar is doing roughly 70Mbps uncompressed - whenever you add latencies - any DDS seemed to have issues. We strongly advise only using the compressed stream and decompressing it as close to the subscribers as possible (even if it means the VM. There’s a wireless link between the robot and VM, which also adds a latency, despite having a decent bandwidth).

Best of luck
Paweł
on behalf of Husarion Team

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Couple of updates based on messages from the last couple of days:

  1. Please report any issues here so more Teams can benefit from timely responses
  2. Social Media/Community Outreach/Sponsor Interactions scoring - we’re only scoring those areas when prompted. Ideally we’d like to see a really short report on which social media sites you’re actively maintaing, what where the most important actions you’ve made there and so on. Similar for the Community Outreach and Sponsor Interactions - we’d like to see a short information about what has changed since the Competition have started - what new sponsors have you acquired, what events you’ve attended and so on. Also - please have in mind that we’re mostly scoring the efforts - not only the results. I.e. more or less half od the scoring for Sponsor Interactions is for doing stuff with sponsors, not only getting stuff from them (i.e. getting licenses for software is “less valuable” than making into some other company’s promotional video where you were needed on the video set and so on).
  3. Robot Connectivity Slots - as it stays right now - we do not intend to provide any additional Connectivity Slots. This may change if we see a couple of Teams needing it provided a good reasons (and plans) for each of the requested slots.
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One more thing. We’ve noticed that some of you have already published marketing posts with imaginary Competition results. We are strongly against such posts as the ones we’ve seen so far are either factually wrong or provide information in a very misleading way.

To correct some of these issues:

  • results of Test Drives are not “category” results. This Competition neither have awarded, nor intends to award any per-category special titles
  • there are no ranking places set in stone yet. Even if you have not qualified to the next event - it does not mean that you can’t still score points (you can do so i.e. by submitting a final report, doing posts on this forum and so on) - so any claims about final places (ones after the final fifth too) are “best guesses” at best and definitely not final

To sum up - while some of you may feel that the Competition os over (at least for you) please refrain from making any assumptions about the final results - you will get them in due time - which is really not that far from today.

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All VMs now have the updated resource quota. VMs of the Teams that have not been qualified to the Finals have been shut down.

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ros2router reference config update: ansible: More ros2router tweaks · husarion/erc2025@3a50d0e · GitHub
Reminder: we’re only updating .reference files on your VMs. Any migrations should be done by yourself.