World robot summit 2020 assembly challenge – summary of the competition and its outcomes*

The World Robot Summit (WRS) is a robotic ‘challenge and exposition’ organized by the Japanese government to accelerate social implementation, research and development of robots working in realistic daily life, society, and industrial fields. In this paper, we introduce a robot competition of the Industrial Robotics Category of the WRS, called ‘Assembly Challenge’, which is organized by the WRS Industrial Robotics Competition Committee in order to promote the development of the next-generation production systems that can respond to new production demands in agile and lean manners. After the pre-competition held in Tokyo in October 2018, the main competition, the WRS 2020, was originally scheduled to be held in Aichi (partly in Fukushima) in 2020, which was also the Olympic year. However, due to the pandemic of COVID-19, the event was postponed, and the competition was actually held in Aichi in September 2021. In this paper, we introduce the contents and results of the WRS 2020 and analyze the results. We would also like to summarize the 5-year project since 2017 and discuss the outcomes of the WRS.

世界机器人峰会（World Robot Summit，WRS）是由日本政府主办的机器人“挑战与博览会”活动，旨在加速机器人在现实日常生活、社会及工业领域的研发与社会落地应用。本文介绍了由WRS工业机器人竞赛委员会主办的WRS工业机器人类赛事“装配挑战赛（Assembly Challenge）”，该赛事旨在推动可灵活、精益地响应新型生产需求的下一代生产系统的发展。2018年10月于东京举办预选赛之后，主赛事WRS 2020原定于2020年（即东京奥运会举办年）在爱知县（部分场地设于福岛县）举办。然而受COVID-19疫情影响，赛事被迫延期，最终于2021年9月在爱知县顺利举办。本文将介绍WRS 2020赛事的内容与赛果，并对赛果进行分析。同时，本文亦将总结2017年启动以来的五年项目历程，并探讨WRS的项目成果。