(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is teaming up with Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley robotics research and design firm, to launch an international “perception challenge” to drive improvements in sensing and perception technologies for next-generation robots.

“Perception is the key bottleneck to robotics. This competition will progressively advance solutions to perception problems, enabling ever-wider applications for next-generation adaptive, sensing robots,” says Willow Garage senior scientist Gary Bradski.

The competition will debut at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2011, to be held May 9–13 in Shanghai, China. It will join three other competitions, updated versions of two other robotics competitions previously developed by NIST: the Virtual Manufacturing Challenge and the Micro-Robot Challenge, and the Modular and Reconfigurable Robot Challenge, a collaborative effort by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the University of Pennsylvania.

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