Development Of A Virtual Manufacturing Framework: From End-User Performance Requirements To Robot Competitions

This paper presents the motivation behind the new joint NIST/IEEE Virtual Manufacturing Automation Competition (VMAC). This competition strives to take the Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) user community driven requirements and turn them into a low-entry-barrier competition. The objectives, scoring, performance metrics, and operation of the competition are explained. In addition, the entry-barrier lowering infrastructure that is provided to competitors is presented.