Taiwanese high-school teams won top awards at RoboCupJunior, an international robotics competition.
This year’s event was in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, from Wednesday last week to Sunday. It was attended by more than 2,000 college and high-school students from more than 30 countries.
National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology electrical engineering professor Tu Kuo-yang (杜國洋), who was in charge of Taiwan’s teams, on Tuesday said that Team Comet and Team Conductor won top prizes, adding that a judge praised Taiwan for its mature artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Photo courtesy of Team Conductor
Team Comet — led by Taipei Municipal Chengyuan High School teacher Chuang Wen-chi (莊文吉), with students Hsu Cheng-yu (徐承佑) from Chengyuan High School and Tung Kuan-ting (董冠廷) from Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University — won the SuperTeam challenge in the Rescue Simulation League.
The team also won at last year’s competition in Bordeaux, France.
The Rescue Simulation league tested the teams’ abilities in search and rescue missions, Tu said.
The students used AI models to deploy robots on a simulated platform, where they competed against other teams, Tu said.
Team Conductor, led by Creative Block Center teacher Pan Ming-ju (潘銘儒), with students Yeh Ting-an (葉庭銨) from National Experimental High School at Hsinchu Science Park, Wang Tzu-chun (王子駿) from National Chupei Senior High School, Wu Ping-hua (吳秉樺) from Hsinchu Municipal Cheng De High School and Huang Shuo-hung (黃碩弘) from Chung-Hsin High School, were first in the SuperTeam challenge in the Robot OnStage League and claimed the Best Stage Performance Award, the top award in the league.
Team Conductor’s robotics work was an innovative music conductor system that incorporated image recognition technology with robotic controls to instantly recognize a conductor’s gestures and dynamically alter rhythms and pitch of instruments being played by robots, Tu said.
The team achieved excellent integration of arts and technical innovation, Tu said.
The SuperTeam challenges gauged teams’ capabilities after they were randomly grouped and tasked with integrating their works in line with the theme of the competition organizer, he said.
That comprehensively tested the students’ communication skills, teamwork, innovation, resilience and technical competency, he said.
RoboCup is among the world’s top three robotics competitions and has the strongest academic nature. It originated in 1992 with the goal of creating a robot that can outperform humans at soccer by 2050.
RoboCupJunior is a part of RoboCup and offers challenges for students aged up to 19, with a focus on project-oriented education.
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