Relevant institutions:

2019 Second China "AI+" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition--The Unmanned System Technology Competition (hereinafter referred to as the "Competition") will be held from August to November 2019.

Unmanned system is an important part of artificial intelligence research. In recent years, unmanned system technology has developed rapidly and its application fields have been expanded continuously. In order to promote the technical exchange and development of unmanned systems, the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence and Tsinghua University jointly hosted this unmanned system technology competition to provide a good communication platform for researchers engaged in artificial intelligence and its application research in unmanned systems, industry practitioners and AI technology enthusiasts. The relevant matters of the competition are hereby notified as follows:

1. Competition institutions

I. Host

Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence

II. Organizers

Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University

General Department of the Third Institute of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation

III. Co-Organizers

Intelligent Robotics Research Center, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University

Editorial Department of "Unmanned System Technology", Beijing Haiying Scientific and Technical Information Institute

Key Laboratory of Complex System Control and Intelligent Collaborative Technology

2. Entry method

I. Participants

This competition is an event for researchers in the field of unmanned systems in the country. All sectors and individuals, including universities, research institutions, unmanned system research companies, research associations and researchers interested in related research are welcome to actively participate in the competition.

2. Team form

Competitors can sign up on the Internet or participate in groups or as individuals. The region, age and occupation of competitors are not limited.

Participants and units are required to abide by scientific research integrity and have no black mark; the software, system, technology and related patents of the participating projects shall belong exclusively to the participating teams and individuals, and there is no dispute over property rights with any other institutions or individuals. Any disputes over infringement of intellectual property rights with external institutions during the competition or plagiarism, once found and verified, would immediately terminate the qualification of the team and cancel the awards it has won.

3. Registration method

Before August 30, 2019, the participating teams will register online in the registration system of the competition website (https://aichina.caai.cn/), complete the relevant information entry, and get registered. (Special requirements can be addressed to the competition organizing committee after being determined by each competition area itself)

4. Competition task

1) Flight simulation group

Competition task description:

(1) Multi-target recognition: Identify a specified target in a given video.

A given video is taken by a drone, and the specified task target is a specified target category in the video scene, such as vehicles, persons, buildings, etc., and the participating teams should give bounding boxes of the specified target.

(2) Moving target tracking: Track moving targets in a given video.

A given video taken by a drone contains multiple moving targets, such as vehicles, pedestrians, or animals. At the beginning of the video, the team identifies the specified targets, gives the bounding boxes, and then the bounding box trajectory of the target in the video.

The event organizing committee will announce the competition video sample that contains examples of target categories before August 15th.

2) Flight operation group

Competition task description:

(1) Fixed target object delivery:

A UAV autonomously flies in an outdoor environment site of 200m×200m. The unmanned autonomous flight system takes off from the starting point, reaches the designated area, identifies the target, and grabs a square object with a diameter of 10cm or less and a weight of 0.1kg or less, and flies to the designated area to identify a static specific target marked with a number. The target areas, marked as 1 and 2, are above 60cm × 40cm. The aircraft first needs to place the object on target 1, fly back to the designated area to pick up the object, bring it to the designated area, and place it on the target 2 to finish the task.

(2) Moving target object delivery:

A UAV autonomously flies in an outdoor environment site of 200m×200m. The unmanned autonomous flight system takes off from the starting point, reaches the designated area, identifies the target, and grabs a square object with a diameter of 10cm or less and a weight of 0.1kg or less, and flies to the designated area to identify a moving vehicle target, whose area is above 60cm × 40cm, drop the object onto the moving target and fly back to the destination. In the preliminaries, the vehicle target adopts linear motion and its moving speed is below 300mm/s. The organizing committee will release the documents that contain the location of the competition venue, task samples and examples of targets before August 15.

5. Entry requirements

Before the competition, the team must sign a scientific ethics commitment letter to ensure that the participating software and system should be the technical achievements independently designed and developed by the participating team members. Misconducts such as plagiarism are strictly prohibited, and would, once found out, terminate the qualification of the participating team.

3. Competition Schedule

August 8, 2019: Release announcement of the competition, start registration

August 15, 2019: Release game sample data and specific evaluation plan

September 30, 2019: Deadline for registration

October 10, 2019: Deadline for Flight Simulation Group Submission

October 15, 2019: Flight Operations Group Preliminary

October 30, 2019: Release the name list for the finals

Late November or early December 2020: Finals and awards-giving

4. Competition system

1. Overall process of the competition

1) Flight simulation group

The competitions for flight simulation group are all conducted online. After registration, participating teams can get the sample video for model training and software development before September 1, 2019. On August 31, 2019, the organizing committee will release the competition video. The participating team can submit the target identification and tracking results through the network within 10 days, and each team has one chance to submit the results.

2) Flight operation group

The flight operation competition is divided into two stages: preliminary and final.

(1) Preliminary competition: The participating team must complete the registration before August 30, 2019, and participate in the preliminary competition in Yungang, Beijing on September 15, 2019.

(2) Finals: The finals will be organized in November 2019 in Yungang, Beijing. The final will be divided into two parts: competition and technical exchange.

2. Introduction to competition rules

1) Flight simulation group:

(1) Participants are allowed to use open source code, tools, and public datasets, and the unpublished code and datasets developed by the team itself in the past as well.

(2) The final qualification would by confirmed after evaluation by the organizing committee; The refusal or failure, if any, to provide the corresponding code and documents within the specified time would cancel the final qualification of the participating team.

(3) Evaluation rules:

(i) Multi-target recognition. This competition uses MSCOCO's evaluation index[1], which is the average of the mAP scores at 10 IoU thresholds for all object categories.

(ii) Tracking of moving targets. This competition uses the mean values of the two evaluation indicators, namely MOTA and MOTP, on the MOT16 data set to rank participants[2]. During the calculation, the IoU threshold is fixed at 0.5.

MOTA considers the number of false positives(FP), false negatives (FN), and identity switch (IDSW) on a frame-by-frame basis. The formula is as follows, where t represents the serial number of the picture frame and GT represents the number of true values.

MOTP calculates the average overlap rate for all correctly matched targets, and the formula is as follows, where t[SI1]  represents the number of targets in the t-th frame whose IoU score is above the threshold and correctly matched, and ti[SI2]  represents the IoU score between the bounding box of the output of the i-th target in the t-th frame and the true value.

[1] See: Reference http://cocodataset.org/#detection-eval

[2] See: Milan, Anton, et al. "MOT16: A benchmark for multi-object tracking." arXiv preprint arXiv: 1603.00831 (2016).

 2) Flight operation group:

(1) The participating teams should use the rotor helicopter with a load of less than 6kg to participate in the competition. When executing the task, the aircraft should fly autonomously during the whole process of, and no artificial remote control is allowed.

(2) The competition does not limit the way in which the object is grabbed. The competition does not limit the type of sensor that can be used on the flight platform.

(3) Evaluation rules:

(i) Fixed target object delivery: The competition will give scores according to accuracy and completion speed. The accuracy rate is scored by the distance between the center of the object and the center of the target. The task completion speed refers to the time when the aircraft takes off from the specified position and returns to the designated position after finishing the tasks. Complete the task within the specified time, and rank the results with accuracy. If the accuracy is the same, one with a faster task completion speed ranked higher. If the task cannot be completed within the specified time, and the score is deducted according to the extra time used.

(ii) Moving target object delivery: The scoring principle is the same as the fixed target object delivery, and to be specific, is to score according to accuracy and completion speed.

(iii) The specific rating rules will be released along with the task sample documents.

5. Awards Settings

In this competition, 6 teams will be selected to enter the finals, and in the end there would be 1 champion team, 2 teams in the second place, and 3 teams in the third place.

6. Competition Management

I. Entry Fee

There is no charge for this entry.

II. Catering Accommodation

The teachers and students participating in the finals are responsible for their accommodation, transportation and other expenses during this period.

III. Contact Information of Competition Secretariat

Registration website: https://aichina.caai.cn/

Contact person for registration, event affairs and others:

Intelligent Robotics Research Center, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, Liu Ping, 18210619376, lipi26@foxmail.com

Editorial Department of "Unmanned System Technology", Beijing Haiying Scientific and Technical Information Institute, Wang Yilin, 185 0038 8390

Li Zhi, 13161006067, chinauas310@163.com

Key Laboratory of Complex System Control and Intelligent Collaborative Technology, Zhao Jiajia, 1521099109, 440068986@qq.com

2019 Second China "AI+" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition

--Unmanned System Technology Competition Organizing Committee