The EarthRover Challenge 2025

The Earth Rover Challenge returns next week at ICRA — one of the world’s premier robotics conferences — for its second edition. It’s not a simulation, a paper, or a demo: it’s a global, high-stakes navigation race run on real streets, using real robots, facing real-world conditions.

Teams from leading AI research labs and elite human gamers will compete by remotely piloting EarthRovers — Frodobots’ outdoor-ready delivery bots — through mission-based tasks. Each mission challenges teams to guide their rover through a sequence of GPS checkpoints, spread across 8 cities in countries including Kenya, Costa Rica, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.

All participants, whether AI models or human operators, deal with the same messy stack: GPS drift, sidewalk clutter, unpredictable pedestrian movement, and the inherent latency of real-time control over the internet. This is robotics without a safety net — a rare and valuable environment for benchmarking performance outside the lab.