The Robotic Competition is designed for teams of three students whose task is to build their own robot from the LEGO Education Mindstorms kit. The robot must then complete a task that changes every year. So what's this year's challenge?
"The aim of the 'Hot Potato' task is to build and program a robot to pick up as many ping pong balls as possible from the competition field and move them to the field of the competing robot within a time limit of 90 seconds independently and without any other help," described the main organizer of the competition, Dr. Martin Hlinovský from the Department of Control Engineering at the CTU FEE. According to him, the competitors cannot control the robot during the game by voice, Bluetooth, or other communication. "For easier orientation, black lines are marked on the playground. The number of points scored decides the winner. The majority of the competition will be organized as a mutual match between two robots on two separate pitches," Dr. Hlinovský said. For details about the competition, including the rules of robot construction and programming, interested parties can visit the event website. The best teams will receive interesting electronic prizes.
The competition rounds will take place on 23, 24, and 25 April in the Zenger Auditorium of the FEE CTU at Karlovo náměstí 13 in Prague. The finals will take place in May during the popular Maker Faire festival. Any number of teams from each school can enter the Robocompetition, however, the organizers guarantee the loan of LEGO sets to a maximum of two teams from each registered school. However, all participants will receive a Robotic Competition T-shirt as a souvenir and refreshments will be provided during the competition. Transportation to the competition will be paid for by each individual.
The Robotic Competition for primary and lower classes of grammar schools will be held for the ninth time. Last year, in a task on the topic of sorting colored cubes, the team "Kraken" from Příbram Gymnasium won. In previous years, robots assembled by student teams competed in tasks such as "playing" ping pong, nimbly crossing a "mountain ridge", traversing a maze made of colored squares as quickly as possible, or collecting the maximum number of balls from a surface and scoring them into target areas.
The Robotic Competition for the younger students is traditionally the spring stage of the Robotic Competition. The fall stage is for student teams from high schools.
Photo credit: Petr Neugebauer
