IIIT-A team bags international award

Indian Institute of Information Technology-Allahabad (IIIT-A) emerged victorious in the Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) Challenge—NeurIPS 2023— held in New Orleans, USA recently

Indian Institute of Information Technology-Allahabad (IIIT-A) emerged victorious in the Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) Challenge—NeurIPS 2023— held in New Orleans, USA recently.

The IIIT-A team. (Sourced)

The team led by senior faculty Prof GC Nandi from IIIT-A and comprising Gaurav Yadav, Arjun and Andrew Melnik won the ‘Home Robot Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation International Challenge 2023’ held under NeurIPS-2023.

Prof Nandi on Monday said that this achievement comes after competing against some 79 entries from around the globe.

It is indeed a moment of immense joy, not only for the participants but for the entire IIIT community, marking a significant milestone in international recognition for the institute and the Centre of Intelligent Robotics, he added.

“We worked very hard almost daily with my DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service DAAD or Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) partner Andrew Melnik and his team on this project. Although we are only able to scratch the surface of this truly international and extremely challenging competition,” he added.

He further added that IIIT-A also had a joint paper accepted in the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023, held from December 10 to 16, FMDM workshop in New Orleans, USA.

Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) Challenge is aimed at creating a platform that enables researchers to develop agents that can navigate unfamiliar environments, manipulate novel objects, and move away from closed object classes towards open-vocabulary natural language. This challenge aims to facilitate cross-cutting research in embodied AI using recent advances in machine learning, computer vision, natural language, and robotics.

Prof Mukul Sharad Sutaone, director, IIIT-A congratulated Prof Nandi and the team on this achievement.