From ERL to RAMI: Expanding Marine Robotics Competitions Through Virtual Events

Robotics competitions have the potential of engaging the future engineers and improving their technical and soft skills. In competitions, students are faced with unique challenges, usually not present in theoretical lectures. CMRE has been organising marine robotics competitions since 2010. Along the years, these have become more complex, including multi-domain cooperation and have become more applicative (from search and rescue to oil & gas). Similarly, there were changes in the scoring methodology and purpose of the competition. While the European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency has been running for a few years with search and rescue scenarios, recently, CMRE has been working on a new competition, the Robotics for Asset Maintenance and Inspection (RAMI), which expands the precise scientific scoring method of ERL Emergency to a metrological evaluation. RAMI competition inaugurates a new concept of having both physical and cascade (based on acquired data) competitions. This enlarges the competition to research communities typically not engaged in marine robotics such as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community. This paper reports on the latest ERL Emergency event (held in 2019) and on the ongoing implementation of the new RAMI competition.