The Earth Rover Challenge: FrodoBots, YGG, and DeepMind Researchers Lead “AI vs Gamers” Robotics Competition

Singapore, Singapore, September 16th, 2024, GamingWire

The First-of-Its-Kind Competition Pits Top Human Gamers against Autonomous AI Models at IROS 2024

FrodoBots, a pioneer in robotics gaming, is thrilled to announce a groundbreaking collaboration with Yield Guild Games (YGG), a web3 guild protocol, and introduce the inaugural AI vs. Gamers: Earth Rover Challenge.

This partnership marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Embodied AI research and ushers in a new paradigm for crowdsourcing real-world data by merging robotics and gaming.

The competition, co-organized with researchers from Google Deepmind and other research institutes, will take place during the prestigious IROS 2024, the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, from October 16-17 in Abu Dhabi.

An "AI vs Humans" Competition

The Earth Rover Challenge is a first-of-its-kind competition where 5 AI teams and 5 human gamers will remotely control small-sized sidewalk robots while completing real-world navigation missions across multiple cities including Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Taipei, Stockholm, and more.

Participating AI teams include research labs from UC Berkeley, UT Austin, Carnegie Mellon University, National University of Singapore, Seoul National University, etc. Human gamers will be selected from the top leaderboard of thousands of YGG gamers previously playing FrodoBots’ first gaming title: Earth Rover.

"At FrodoBots, we believe the intersection of robotics and gaming could create unique gaming experiences for gamers while making meaningful contributions to Embodied AI research by collecting real-world datasets from these IRL gaming sessions," - Michael Cho, Cofounder of FrodoBots.

Gaming And The New Gig Economy

FrodoBots' collaboration with YGG advances the gaming-enabled gig economy initiated by the play-and-earn movement. Through this competition, the partners hope to showcase the potential of robotic gaming as a tool for large-scale teleoperation data collection.

"Participating in this competition opens up exciting new opportunities for the gamers in our community. This collaboration exemplifies the ‘Future of Work’ and how web3 gaming can have tangible impact beyond the digital realm and help contribute to advancements in AI and robotics, while having fun." - Beryl Li, Cofounder of Yield Guild Games

Advancing AI Robotics Research

As part of the competition, FrodoBots has open-sourced a 2,000-hour driving dataset, the largest of its kind in the public domain. In addition, participating AI teams will have access to FrodoBots’ global fleet of robots deployed in over a dozen cities across all six continents, allowing for AI model evaluation on an unprecedented scale under "in the wild" settings.

"As a researcher, I was really intrigued by FrodoBots' unique approach to solving the data bottleneck problem in AI Robotics research by introducing gaming to the mix. More importantly, the large fleet deployed in diverse locations provided by FrodoBots created an ideal benchmark to evaluate robot policies in real-world settings. I'm glad to co-organize this competition alongside my colleagues and the FrodoBots team where we'd test the progress of autonomous AI models against human performance,” - Jie Tan, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google DeepMind."Beyond the open-source dataset, this competition provides a common set of diverse natural environments to deploy and evaluate competing research approaches ‘in the wild’, something that's sorely needed in robotics research. It also pits robot autonomy against human intelligence. It’s a true test of generalization, the key challenge of robot learning.” - Prof David Hsu, Provost's Chair Professor, National University of Singapore.

FrodoBots plans to continue co-hosting such competitions with researchers while expanding the scope to include other robotic tasks with new robotic gaming titles in its push to make meaningful contributions to Embodied AI research.

For more information about the competition, users can visit the Earth Rover Challenge official website.

About FrodoBots

FrodoBots is transforming the landscape of gaming and Embodied AI research by crowdsourcing real-world datasets through its unique robotics gaming titles. With games like "Earth Rovers" where players earn points by exploring the world via teleoperated sidewalk robots, and "Octo Arms" which challenges gamers to solve 3D puzzles with robotic arms, FrodoBots is merging entertainment with robotics.

About YGG

Yield Guild Games (YGG) is a web3 guild protocol that enables players and gaming guilds to find their community, discover games and level up together. As a network of gaming guilds focused on web3 games, YGG provides an equal-opportunity support system so that its members can become power players in games and in life.

YGG empowers its guild community to organize onchain, providing guilds access to its infrastructure for them to scale and receive opportunities based on their specializations. Through YGG’s questing initiatives, such as Superquests and the Guild Advancement Program (GAP), members of YGG can benefit from its achievement-based reputation system and build their onchain identity.

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