It seems like yesterday when CMU won the DARPA Urban Challenge and Stanford the DARPA Grand Challenge. And yet, it was nearly 1.5 years ago when the most recent of the two concluded. A similar challenge event also took place in the UK and Google still has an ongoing Lunar X Prize. The Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC 2010) cosponsored by the Defence Science & Technology Organisation (DSTO) in Australia and the Research Development & Engineering Command (RDECOM) in USA is a new event that was announced at the begining of this month.

MAGIC is different than the other challenges because it no longer focuses on the development of a single intelligent vehicle but an entire team of cooperating intelligent vehicles. The goal of this multi-agent team will be to perform "intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission in a dynamic urban environment."

Creating a team of cooperating agents is a much more difficult task than creating a single agent; these agents have to be able to share information and workout cooperative plans that take advantage of all information available to all agents which may be difficult to communicate in certain circumstances.

On the other hand, it can be far more efficient to use multiple vehicles to complete a particular task. If the task can be broken down into smaller tasks that different vehicles can complete and then merge the solutions, e.g., cooperative mapping of a large space can be achieved twice as fast by two vehicles compared to just one.

MAGIC participants will have to complete the following tasks:

(i) Accurately and completely explore and map the challenge area; (ii) correctly locate, classify and recognise all simulated threats; and (iii) complete all phases within 3.5 hours.

There are some prize money for the winners and a small amount of funding for select participants. More specifically, 5 teams will receive funding of $100,000 each. The top 3 teams will receive $750,000, $250,000, and $100,000 respectively. The final event is scheduled to take place during the week of November 8, 2010, somewhere in South Australia.

I'm curious to see what kind of multi-vehicle teams robotics researchers design to tackle this challenge.