Shared benchmark problems have historically been a fundamental driver of progress for scientific communities. In the context of academic conferences, competitions offer the opportunity to researchers with different origins, backgrounds, and levels of seniority to quantitatively compare their ideas. In robotics, a hot and challenging topic is sim2real-porting approaches that work well in simulation to real robot hardware. In our case, creating a hybrid competition with both simulation and real robot components was also dictated by the uncertainties around travel and logistics in the post-COVID-19 world. Hence, this article motivates and describes an aerial sim2real robot competition that ran during the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, from the specification of the competition task, to the details of the software infrastructure supporting simulation and real-life experiments, to the approaches of the top-placed teams and the lessons learned by participants and organizers.

翻译：共享基准问题在历史上一直是科学社区进步的根本驱动力。在学术会议背景下，竞赛为不同来源、背景和资历层次的研究人员提供了定量比较其想法的机会。在机器人学领域，一个热门且具有挑战性的课题是仿真到现实迁移——将仿真中表现良好的方法移植到真实机器人硬件上。在我们案例中，创建兼具仿真与真实机器人组件的混合竞赛也源于后新冠时代旅行与物流的不确定性。因此，本文从竞赛任务规范、支持仿真与真实实验的软件基础设施细节，到优胜团队的方案及参与者与组织方总结的经验教训，对2022年IEEE/RSJ智能机器人与系统国际会议上举办的一场空中机器人仿真到现实竞赛进行了阐述与动机分析。