ITMO Team Takes Gold at RobotChallenge 2025

ITMO’s team was made up of two final-year school students: Alexander Syrkovsky from Lyceum 533 and Stepan Muravyov from Presidential Lyceum No. 239; also on the team was musician Artemiy Navrotskiy.

The team was coached by Igor Lositskiy, the head of ITMO’s Youth Robotics Lab, and Evgeny Zavarin, an engineer at the laboratory.

At the tournament, the young roboticists presented their work in the category FreeStyle Senior, which is intended for robots that don’t fit the criteria of other categories. Each robot is evaluated on a five-point scale by several judges, who assess both the idea and the implementation, including the technologies and software involved, as well as the overall presentation.

ITMO’s team joined the tournament with their saxophonist robot Fantastic Robby Brown. As he plays one of the most complex instruments in terms of sound-making, the developers had to design not only a system for pressing buttons, but also a unique way of supplying air into the saxophone. As a result, the robot “learned” to blow into the instrument using his lips, closely imitating the way a human would play it. Moreover, Robby Brown can gesticulate and nod to the music, smile, and interact with his audience.

Each body part of the robot has its own controller, all managed by a central control block that instructs them when to switch playing modes and animations. Moreover, the robot has a built-in computer with machine vision: it reads the audience’s expressions and sends commands to the robot – that’s how Robby Brown can react to his viewers and change his behavior.

“We started working on Robby Brown less than a year ago. We wanted to create a jazz robot that would be able to accompany a musician. By the way, we used AI to help us design the robot’s appearance and pick the name. As a result, in a year Robby Brown has learned a dozen of famous musical pieces; in Beijing, it performed Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called To Say I Love You, Flight of the Bumblebee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Louis Armstrong’s Go Down Moses, and the Russian song Katyusha. The robot can play in two modes: if the melody is already in its library, it will detect the chords and intervals and begin playing. Otherwise, it is able to listen to a melody and then repeat it, even in noisy conditions. I think that the complexity and novelty of our project, as well as our team’s spirit, focus on results, and previous experience have led us to a win this time,” shares Igor Lositsky, the team’s coach and the head of ITMO’s Youth Robotics Lab.

Next, the team is planning to integrate the robot into their Cyber Theater and train it to improvise so that it can perform melodies in a particular style. Robby Brown will also be presented at other competitions such as RoboCup Asia-Pacific in Abu Dhabi and the Congress of Young Scientists in Sochi.

RobotChallenge is an international robotics championship that has been held since 2004. This year, the contest was held in Beijing on August 14-17 and brought together over 5,000 participants from 42 countries. Among the categories that teams competed in were RoboSumo, Robot Bowling, Air Race, Humanoid Robots, Line Follower, Puck Collect, and an “unknown mission” that was only revealed on the day of the competition. Each category has several age groups, welcoming both school and university students.

This isn’t the first win for ITMO’s Youth Robotics Team. In 2023, they took the first place in a creative category with a different project – a robot musician Robert Robotecky, who performed several songs on a concertina while balancing on a gyro scooter. 

The creative robotics lab where students work on these projects is implemented jointly with the Presidential Lyceum No. 239 at ITMO’s Youth Robotics Lab. Both school and university students can collaborate there. Since its establishment, the lab’s students have regularly excelled at Russian and international competitions, including RobotChallenge, World Robot Olympiad, RoboCup, and others.