Comment Another highlight: MAGIC 2010 competition (Score 2) 38
This was also the first year of the multi autonomous ground-robotic international challenge (MAGIC), in which teams of robots collaborated to perform urban recon/search-rescue type missions. This competition focused on autonomous exploration, map building, object recognition, and coordination between both the robots and the human operators. 23 teams from around the world entered the competition, with the top five finalists competing just a few weeks ago in Adelaide, Australia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Autonomous_Ground-robotic_International_Challenge
It was also covered on slashdot:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/11/19/004203
And Team Michigan, from the University of Michigan, took first place and $750k in prize money. (Forgive my obvious bias, I'm the team leader