Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge

The Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC) is a 1.6 million dollar prize competition for autonomous mobile robots funded by TARDEC and the DSTO, the primary research organizations for Tank and Defense research in the United States and Australia respectively.

The goal of the competition is to create multi-vehicle robotic teams that can execute an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission in a dynamic urban environment.

Ultimately the overall goal of fully autonomous operations without human intervention was not achieved, however, the Secretary for Defence stated "The competing vehicles demonstrated new advances in robotics technology, which are very promising for their potential deployment in combat zones where they can replace our troops in carrying out life-threatening tasks" [3] and considered the competition a success.

Key technology used by all teams was computer vision, sensor fusion, human-robot interaction, and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

See the September/October 2012 special issue of the Journal of Field Robotics[4] for contest highlights, technical approaches taken by several of the teams, and an explanation of the evaluation metrics used by organizers.