ACROBA’s Acrobathons : Engaging Stakeholders in Robotics Innovation
The ACROBA project has successfully engaged academic and industrial communities through a series of hackathons held across Europe. These “Acrobathons” have played a key role in disseminating the project’s outcomes, fostering a vibrant community around the ACROBA solution, and strengthening collaboration with robotics Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs).
Inspired by traditional hackathons, Acrobathons are competition-style events where participants work intensively within a limited timeframe (typically 24 to 48 hours) to develop innovative solutions to specific challenges. These events are designed to bring together developers, designers, innovators, and other domain experts in an inclusive, agile, multidisciplinary, and collaborative environment. By promoting shorter innovation cycles, Acrobathons are particularly well-suited to ensure the successful adoption and further development of the ACROBA solution by the wider community.
These events have provided an excellent platform for students, professionals, and researchers to collaborate on cutting-edge solutions in cognitive robotics, fully aligning with ACROBA’s mission to revolutionize industrial automation.
So far, the ACROBA project partners have organized five mini-Acrobathons and one master hackathon, addressing three key challenges. Together, these events have brought together over 150 participants in six different countries.
ACROBA Mega Hackathon
Robocoast, Samk – Satakunta University of Applied Sciences
Pori – FINLAND
Gripper design and manufacturing
Participants were challenged to design gripper fingers able to grasp pieces in packed boxes, as well as to have precise regrasping.
After designing the part, each team had to 3D print it and then test it with metal pieces.
Validate robotic solutions in simulated industrial process in the Virtual Gym
This challenge focused on bin-picking, regrasping and assembly in virtual environment. The teams were challenged to propose solutions to the following issues:
- algorithm for localizing pieces cluttered in a container
- design grasping pose given object pose;
- algorithm for ranking the grasping order given multiple detected object poses.
- estimate piece orientation in the regrasping bin;
- designing the proper path for controlling the robot to insert the piece into the jig.
Installation and Integration of ACROBA platform and third-party modules
This challenge focused on the development of tools/wizards to support/enhance the installation of the ACROBA Platform and the integration of 3rd party software modules (ros packages, skills, primitives, libraries, …) into the ACROBA platform. The tools should consider the aspects: compatibility, installation, testing and validation.
