Education by competition

This paper discusses the need to conduct competitions among advanced robotic students and researchers in the field of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). A contest in the area of visual SLAM would provide a good way to benchmark some of the existing methods and bring the researchers even closer together, discussing both the open problems and specific implementation details with each other. It will also make it possible for young researchers that may not be directly involved in the competition to talk to the more senior colleagues and gain the necessary insight to the related problems.