This weekend I worked on the International (Asian) edition of the Robocon competition. This event is a robotic competition where 20 teams from 19 countries (Japan, as the host country this year, gets two teams) build robots to complete a certain task. All teams are composed of undergraduate students, who design, build, program and control the robots. The task for this year used three robots, the first two of which needed to carry the third robot through a obstacle course, so that the third robot could play three drums in the goal area (video here).

It was a very fun event. All the competitors were very young, and excited about being overseas (sometimes for their first time) to participate. It reminded me a bit of when I participated on the ICPC programming contest finals. In the Robocon 2009, I worked as a translator and assistant for the Macao team. At first they were a bit disappointed that the organization didn’t find a translator that could speak Cantonese, but eventually we got to get along well. Their team leader knew a lot about Japan, and I tried to encourage him to come for grad school here.

The competition itself was composed of two days. During the first day, the teams got to assemble their robots, do practice runs, and clear their questions with the judging team. The contest itself was on the second day. It was composed of two stages. On the first stage the teams were divided in 7 groups of 3 teams which played against each other. The second stage was championship style, with the first place from each of the 7 groups plus the best second place.

The winner of the contest was the Chinese team. The Chinese had a robot which was clearly superior to the other robots in the contest – it managed to finish the task in 18-19 seconds, while the best robots among the other teams would go for 23-26 seconds. It was a really good piece of engineering, and they really deserved to win, but their matches were a little boring to watch :-P

The second place was the team from Hong Kong – which was a nice surprise. The HK team were the “crazy kids” of the competition – unlike most other teams, they didn’t had an uniform and were often seen around joking. They didn’t do well during their test runs, and even almost broke the goal drum once, which brought a warning from the judges. But they managed to get their game together to fix whatever the problem was in time, and did great times in all their games in the competition. They also the best design prize.

The most disputed game in the day was between Korea and Thailand, in the first stage. In the match, both their robots hit the drum at the same time, and the judges decided to have them try again – but because both robots were based on compressed air, the teams had to rush to the pits to refill the air tanks – it was really tense!

Macao’s team didn’t have much experience – they were 1st and 2nd year students, and never been on a robotic competition before – but in their own way, they did quite well, winning against the Sri Lanka team, and losing against the favorite Toyohashi team. It was interesting to see that the Chinese in the audience would cheer up both the Macao and HK team as well as the team from the mainland – as the the team members put it in his interview to the Japanese TV, “In practice, we are like one country” – some lessons in geopolitics were had.

The competition ended without any serious problems happening (other than the Thais raiding the beer of every table in the farewell party :-D). Tomorrow will be a city tour for the participants, including lunch in the Tokyo Tower, a visit to the Tokyo Science and Technology Museum, and the Gundam in Odaiba. Of course, I’ll tag along to “provide translation” to the kids!