  Shared benchmark problems have historically been a fundamental driver of
progress for scientific communities. In the context of academic conferences,
competitions offer the opportunity to researchers with different origins,
backgrounds, and levels of seniority to quantitatively compare their ideas. In
robotics, a hot and challenging topic is sim2real-porting approaches that work
well in simulation to real robot hardware. In our case, creating a hybrid
competition with both simulation and real robot components was also dictated by
the uncertainties around travel and logistics in the post-COVID-19 world.
Hence, this article motivates and describes an aerial sim2real robot
competition that ran during the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems, from the specification of the competition task,
to the details of the software infrastructure supporting simulation and
real-life experiments, to the approaches of the top-placed teams and the
lessons learned by participants and organizers.
