Russian Team Dominates All Categories at the International League of Robot Runners Competition

A Russian team comprised of students from the Faculty of Computer Science at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) and researchers from AIRI triumphed in the international competition, the League of Robot Runners, which focused on managing thousands of warehouse robots. The team secured first place in all categories, according to a statement from AIRI’s press service to Habr’s news desk.

The competition centered around multi-agent pathfinding, involving numerous robots navigating a shared space without collisions while efficiently accomplishing tasks. The challenges simulating real-world conditions required algorithms to make decisions in just one second, mimicking operations in an actual warehouse. The robots were limited to moving forward, pausing, or turning in place—reflecting how real warehouses operate.

The team included HSE computer science students Yegor Yukhnevich and Artem Brezhnev, led by Anton Andreychuk, a research scientist at the “Cognitive AI Systems” Laboratory in AIRI. They emerged victorious in every category, which included best route planning, task optimization, and the overall category where both challenges had to be addressed simultaneously.

According to the organizers, a total of 1,513 solutions from 50 teams across various countries were tested in the system. Evaluating a single solution could take up to seven hours. The problems and the best solutions will soon be made publicly available.

This was the second time the competition has been held, organized by researchers from Monash University, Rutgers University, and the University of Southern California, with support from Amazon Robotics.

Project leader Anton Andreychuk highlighted that student Yegor Yukhnevich played a pivotal role in their success. Over four months, Yukhnevich thoroughly studied the subject, implemented the team’s ideas, and created a solution that outperformed all competitors. Andreychuk hopes that their developed solution will contribute to improving warehouse space management and optimizing sorting systems.