Iron Circle provides a cloud‑native platform that hosts repeatable robotics challenges accessible via a web browser. Participants upload code and hardware interface definitions, which are run in a deterministic physics simulator or through hardware‑in‑the‑loop connections, and the system automatically scores performance on metrics such as task completion time, energy consumption and precision, delivering detailed reports and real‑time leaderboards for benchmarking.
Funding
Funding not disclosed
Founders
Product
Problem
Robotics teams and developers often lack affordable, standardized venues to validate their designs against consistent benchmarks, leading to fragmented testing, high logistics costs, and limited feedback on performance across comparable scenarios.
Solution
Iron Circle delivers a cloud-native competition platform that hosts repeatable robotics challenges accessible from any web browser. Participants upload code and hardware interface definitions, which the system executes within a high-fidelity physics simulator or via hardware‑in‑the‑loop (HIL) connections. The platform automatically runs predefined test suites, captures sensor streams, and evaluates performance against objective metrics such as task completion time, energy consumption, and precision. Results are aggregated into detailed reports and real‑time leaderboards, enabling teams to benchmark their solutions against peers without arranging physical events. Integration hooks allow continuous‑integration pipelines to trigger challenge runs on every code commit, supporting rapid iteration. All data are stored securely in the cloud and can be exported via RESTful APIs for further analysis or inclusion in academic publications.
Target Audience
The primary users are university robotics labs, student competition teams, and corporate R&D groups that need a scalable, repeatable environment for testing and benchmarking autonomous robot solutions.
Features
- Web‑based competition portal with user authentication and role‑based access control
- Library of pre‑engineered challenge scenarios (navigation, manipulation, swarm coordination) powered by a deterministic physics engine (e.g., NVIDIA PhysX)
- Hardware‑in‑the‑loop (HIL) gateway supporting ROS, Arduino, and custom firmware for real‑robot testing
- Automated scoring engine applying metric‑based evaluation (time, path deviation, power usage) and generating PDF/JSON reports
- Real‑time telemetry dashboard showing sensor feeds, actuator commands, and simulation state during runs
- Leaderboard and ranking system with configurable weighting and team grouping
- CI/CD integration via webhook and CLI tools to trigger challenge execution on code pushes
- Secure data storage with encryption at rest and role‑based API access for result export