The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) Robotics Team once again rose to be the best team out of all the competing universities in Robocon 2014 Hong Kong Contest, which was held in Cyberport on 22 June.

The Robotics Team was formed into two teams in the contest. Team “The War Dragon” won the Champion and the Best Artistic Design Award and team “The Fiery Dragon” won the 1st Runner-up Award and Best Engineering Award. This is the fourth consecutive year in which HKUST students have become the champion of the Robocon Hong Kong Contest and in total the sixth time they received this honor since the inception of the contest in 2004. This is also the fourth time that HKUST received four awards in a year.

The ABU Robocon is a robotics contest held across Asia-Pacific where university students from across the region compete to perform given tasks in a specified amount of time. Each year the contest has a different set of rules. A general format over the years requires each team to make two robots – one manual and one automatic. The theme for Robocon 2014 is “A salute to Parenthood.” To complete the game, each team needs to perform four tasks in three minutes. Each task involves a parent robot (manual) carrying a child robot (automatic) to different regions in the gamefield (see-saw, swing, polewalk, ladder), with the child robot performing specific tasks. The HKUST champion team will represent Hong Kong in ABU Robocon 2014 to be held in India from 24 – 27 August.

Robocon 2014 Hong Kong Contest attracted nine teams from six higher education institutes, namely CityU, CUHK, HKUST, IVE, PolyU and HKU. The two HKUST teams were formed by 30 undergraduate students who are from the Schools of Engineering and Science. The students are supervised by Prof Tim Woo, Director of the Center for Global & Community Engagement (GCE) and Associate Professor of Engineering Education.

The robots manufactured by HKUST were significantly faster and more stable than those manufactured by other teams. HKUST’s robots were also sturdier and the excellent mechanical design facilitated quicker transition and handling times when it came to switching from one task to another, allowing HKUST to gain maximum points. This was made possible by the perfectly created mechanical designs, simplistic hardware and efficient software algorithms, which gave HKUST an edge over the others.

We wish HKUST’s Robotics Team the very best for the international competition in India!

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