2017 Competitions: Magical, Manipulating, Mercurial Robots [Competitions]

'Robot Magic' (RM) was the topic of the Fifth Humanoid Robot Application Challenge at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). The goal of the humanoid application challenge was to allow teams to demonstrate interesting research in robotics and human–robot interaction in a free-form event. The organizers realized that a fully open forum would be very difficult to judge, as entries ranged from individual novel servomotor modules to shared robot laboratory creations. After consulting with the teams, the organizers decided to focus on robot magic-trick applications as an interesting research domain with sufficient flexibility.