The results from the international Hilti Slam Challenge of 2023 were summarized by a jury consisting of experts from leading technical universities. The Russian robotics team Strelka, representing Innopolis University, earned 840.3 points and secured third place in the overall standings according to information released by Innopolis University’s press service.
During the 2023 edition, participants tackled localization and mapping tasks, commonly referred to as SLAM, which stands for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Teams were challenged to reconstruct the path of a tracked robotic platform and generate a map of the surrounding environment using data from lidars, gyroscopes, and cameras. Competitors were allotted one month to devise solutions capable of accurate navigation and mapping. The competition thus tested long-horizon planning, sensor fusion, and real-time data processing under tight time constraints.
Practically speaking, the ability to create precise environmental maps and leverage them for mobile robot navigation has broad implications. The technology is relevant to autonomous movement in industrial settings, construction sites, mining operations, infrastructure inspection, enterprise digitization efforts, and even virtual reality demonstrations. Innopolis highlighted these real-world applications as crucial outcomes of the competition’s focus on realistic perception and mapping challenges.
In the final rankings, the Urban Robotics Lab team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) claimed first place with a score of 1177.6. The University of Hong Kong’s team, known as HKU‑MaRS‑HBA, finished second with a score of 934.4, accompanied by collaboration from DJI in the robotics segment. The top three was completed by Strelka from Innopolis University. In total, around 60 teams from various technical universities around the world took part in the event, underscoring the growing global interest in SLAM and autonomous robotics research. (source attribution: Innopolis University press service)
Ramil Khusainov, a senior researcher at the NTI Competence Center for Robot Technologies and Mechatronics Components Technologies based at Innopolis University, reflected on the results by saying that the team had expected to break into the top ten, and that their performance had surpassed those hopes. The event itself has been organized since 2021 by Hilti, a leading materials and construction software company, in collaboration with the University of Zurich. It takes place within the framework of the ICRA conference, one of the world’s most prestigious gatherings in robotics and automation, where the competition winners are announced and celebrated.
Looking back, the Hilti SLAM competition has evolved into a benchmark for evaluating how well teams can fuse diverse sensor streams into reliable maps. The exercise emphasizes practical navigation tasks, resilience to real-world variability, and the ability to adapt to different environments. As the field of autonomous robotics continues to mature, events like Hilti Slam serve both as a crucible for emerging ideas and as a signal of the shifting priorities in research and industry. The ongoing collaboration between industry leaders, academic institutions, and global researchers helps accelerate the transfer of mapping and localization breakthroughs into tangible products and services for a wide range of sectors.