The official final rounds of the Spring Robotics Competition for Primary Schools took place, as every year, in the last week of April at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of CTU on Charles Square in Prague - this year a total of 113 teams participated and each round had its own winner. This time, however, the organizers decided to invite the best robots once more and thus allow the announcement of the overall winner. A suitable opportunity presented itself at the Maker Faire Prague, which was visited by nearly 10,000 people at Prague´s Výstaviště exhibition grounds on the weekend of 10 and 11 June 2023.
The best robot of the Ping-Pong task becomes... Havárie (the crash)!
The aim of this year's task, called Ping-Pong, was to build and program a lego robot so that it could move as many coloured ping-pong balls as possible to the designated storage areas on a set playing area within a time limit of 90 seconds, independently and without further help. In the three rounds in April and in yesterday's festival superfinal, two robots competed on one symmetrically divided game plan, with success measured by the number of points scored.
On Sunday around 15.00, two teams met head to head in one of the pavilions of the exhibition grounds in Prague to the applause of the gathered crowd in the competion final, of which the absolute victory eventually went to the team Havárie consisting of Martin Půlpytel, Radek Kalousek and Johana Šimon from Technecia Pardubice, who defeated the team Labužníci consisting of Vojtěch Nerad, Jakub Hajný and Lukáš Molnáry from the Klíček Elementary School, Prague 4 by 71:60 points.
High Schools to take part in the Robocompetition again from September
"It was a good idea to organize the superfinal at the Maker Faire festival for two reasons - firstly, robots that had competed separately in previous rounds could compete, and we could announce the overall winner," says the main organizer of the competition, Martin Hlinovský from the Department of Control Engineering at FEL CTU, and continues, "The second advantage of the festival superfinal was that we could introduce the RoboCompetition to thousands of visitors, including young children who are just learning about robotics and our competition."
"Older students can now look forward to and prepare for the autumn part of the Robocompetition for high school teams," Hlinovský reminds. "Registration begins in September and the final competition will take place before Christmas." For information on the results of the Spring 2023 Robocompetition and the upcoming fall portion for high schools, visit the Robocompetition website or Facebook page.