**University of Michigan Wins Amazon’s Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge with Seagull Virtual Robot Project **
The University of Michigan has emerged as the winner of Amazon’s inaugural Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge with their virtual robot project called Seagull. The team, consisting of nine students and their faculty advisor, received $500,000 for their achievement. Seagull impressed the judges with its intuitive control design, ability to complete complex tasks, and follow-up suggestions. The team aimed to create an interactive embodied agent that can learn to assist people in real-world scenarios. The SimBot Challenge was initiated by Amazon to promote research in combining digital robots with artificial intelligence.
Alexa Arena is an embodied-AI framework that enables human-robot interaction through a gamelike setting. It allows users to create robotic tasks in multiroom simulated environments and manipulate objects in real time. The framework supports training and evaluation of embodied-AI models, generating new training data based on human-robot interactions. Alexa Arena includes a large set of multiroom layouts and assets, offering a variety of AI capabilities such as task planning, visual dialogue, and multimodal reasoning. The code repository, datasets, and benchmark models have been publicly released, and a new leaderboard is available to evaluate the performance of embodied agents. The framework powers the Alexa Prize Simbot challenge, and it supports the creation of long-horizon robotic tasks.
https://www.amazon.science/alexa-prize/university-of-michigans-seagull-wins-alexa-prize-simbot-challenge