The Telepresence Competition will be organized in conjunction with the IEEE Telepresence Conference. The field challenge will take place on November 15^th2024, at Peterman Hill, in California, and will be transmitted live. Peterman Hill is public land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and is located in Lucerne Valley, CA, 96 miles from Pasadena and Caltech, 123 miles from Los Angeles International Airport.

Videos recording of telepresence demonstrations will be shown during the Conference. 

The 2024  competition will focus on demonstrating telepresence capabilities for robotic vehicles that navigate terrestrial analog of lunar environment, in high desert terrain, in two tracks:

A) Sloped Terrain Mobility Track – testing mobility on slopes with sand and rocks.

B) Regolith Interaction Track – flat terrain with sand and lunar regolith simulant.

Two modalities of entries will be supported: 1) with your own robots.2) with robots provided by the organizers.

While the robotic platforms and software from the organizers are still to be determined we are pleased to announce that Off World (https://www.offworld.ai/) offered to provide several robots. 

Space Resource Technologies (https://spaceresourcetech.com/) offered to provide lunar regolith simulant.

We are in discussions with other partners for track preparations and logistics.

The IEEE Telepresence Competition is sponsored by the IEEE Future Directions Initiative and by the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, with additional financial and logistic support from a number of other organizations.  

The competition is organized by the IEEE SMC Human and Robotic Space Exploration committee, led by Robert Mueller from NASA Kennedy Space Center, Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Edward Tunstel from Motiv Space Systems and Yutao He, IEEE SMCS Los Angeles Chapter.

Various prizes will be awarded. A $5,000 prize for the winning team in Track A will be provided by the IEEE Telepresence Initiative, and a $5000 prize will be provided by the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society for the winner in Track B.   Other prizes expected from corporate sponsors.