A team of five undergraduates from the HKUST Robotics Team won the 1st Runner-up and Dynamizer Award in the 5th ROBO-ONE auto in Kanagawa, Japan on September 28, 2019. This is the first time for a Hong Kong team to participate in ROBO-ONE, the largest biped robot competition worldwide which was first held in Japan in 2002. ROBO-ONE auto is an autonomous biped robot competition under ROBO-ONE and attracted 18 teams from Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong this year.

The five students come from four different disciplines, namely computer engineering, computer science, electronic engineering and mechanical engineering. Each of them acquired different engineering knowledge through their learning experiences and successfully contributed it to the team.

It took them several months to finish the robot, including mechanical designs, electronic circuit designs, and algorithm designs. Their goal is to create a biped robot to fight with the opponent automatically. The prerequisite is that their robot needs to accurately recognize an object, a person, and another robot in front, which is also a compulsory task in the screening before the competition. To help their robot to make these recognitions, the team had been working on the depth camera together with machine learning.

In addition, the team examined the walking gait of their robot via simulation so that they can have a more rigorous control of how their robot walks. Apart from the algorithm, plenty of designs and prototyping were carried out repeatedly to realize a reliable and effective mechanical design of the robot. It also took effort to merge all those components in order to build the robot. Finally, all the hard work paid off as they delivered outstanding performance in the contest.

Student List

Related links:

• The 5th ROBO-ONE auto
• ROBO-ONE official website

This news was prepared with the help of HKUST Robotics Team member MAK Kin-Wing (Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Year 4 undergraduate).