Learning Through Competitions—The FIRA Youth Mission Impossible Competition

This paper discusses challenges and opportunities when using competitions in robotics education. The authors describe the Federation of International RoboSports Association (FIRA) competition and, in particular, the FIRA Youth—Mission Impossible, an event targeted at overcoming problems of students consciously or thoughtlessly plagiarizing, by forcing students to solve previously unknown tasks. The paper shows an example of the positive influence robot competitions can have on cutting-edge research, even when targeted at younger roboticists. The FIRA Youth—Mission Impossible 2022 competition, where students had to measure the weight of bottles, and hence the wrench applied on the robot using only proprioception, inspired an initial approach and the creation of a practical test-bed for much more complex wrench estimation on hexapod robots.