AI for Industry Challenge

Brought to you by Intrinsic and Open Robotics

The AI for Industry Challenge is an open competition for developers and roboticists who want to tackle some of the hardest, high-impact problems that exist in robotics and manufacturing. Win a share of $180,000 prize pool.

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Register for the AI for Industry Challenge

Registration deadline: April 17, 2026

The AI for Industry Challenge targets a high-value bottleneck in modern manufacturing: electronics assembly. More specifically dexterous cable management and insertion, which today is a manual, repetitive process.

In terms of robotics, this task is notoriously difficult due to the complex physics of flexible cables and the precision required to see, handle and carefully insert connectors. ‍

Train an AI model using open-source simulators (e.g., Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Gazebo), leveraging ROS for communication. This is your opportunity to bridge the sim-to-real gap and make real progress against a very real problem. 


‍Finalists will deploy their models from simulation to a physical workcell which will be hosted at Intrinsic’s HQ. The top five solutions and teams win a share of the $180,000 prize pool.

Phases of the challenge

1. Train your model

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During qualification, use your favorite tools, including open source tools and simulators, along with the Intrinsic challenge toolkit, to train your model and solve the cable insertion task. Submitted models will be evaluated using Gazebo.

2. Develop in Flowstate

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For those who advance to phase #1 - teams will gain access to Intrinsic Flowstate, our development environment, and the Intrinsic Vision Model to build a complete robotic cable handling solution using their trained models.

3. Run on real robots

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Phase #2 participants will get the chance to deploy their solution to a robotic workcell set up at Intrinsic’s HQ - for real world solution validation and a chance to win prizes.