FIRST Tech Challenge Italy Championship was held in February and welcomed 44 teams from 13 countries, including Germany, Spain, Moldova, Romania, Czechia, and Zimbabwe. The St. Petersburg-based team Sputnik Original gained the most points throughout the championship, ending up as the absolute winner of the event. 

A team from the suburbs 

Sputnik Original consists of 13 students of grades 7-11 and members of the Robotics School of Lyceum No. 244. The team was trained by four mentors, all former students of the lyceum who now study at the city’s universities. Among them are three ITMO Master’s students: Ilya Kutsyi, Mikhail Sladkov, and Dmitry Lukin. 

Founded a decade ago, the lyceum’s Robotics School started as a small community of robotics enthusiasts. Back then, their classes were held at a physics lab, were taught by one lecturer, and didn’t involve any specialized equipment or computers. The community has kept growing and now includes 150 students and 11 lecturers who enjoy access to two spacious classrooms equipped with anything from computers and printers to a workbench and even a robot testing ground. The Robotics School is supported by partners, including the research and manufacturing association StartLine, the company Contact, and various printworks and municipal authorities around the city.

“I used to be a member of the team, then I became captain, and then, as a university student, I mentored the junior team. Now I am responsible for the senior team. Through the years, I got to see how being a part of the school changes students: it gives them inspiration and motivation for their future successes; this is the atmosphere I keep coming back for. At the school, we do our best to support the growth of our students. They start their classes all the way back in primary school and by grade 7-8, they are working along an individual trajectory. Nearly all of our students land tuition-free positions at engineering universities, which, I believe, indicates that we are moving in the right direction. Victories, including the recent one  in Italy, truly become a motivation to move forward. This proves that students from an ordinary lyceum in the city’s suburbs can be the best in their field. They only need to work hard to get to their dream,” shares Ilya Kutsyi, the team’s coach and a Master’s student at ITMO’s Higher School of Engineering and Technology.

Training late into the night

FIRST Tech Challenge Championship included two rounds. In the first one, Sputnik Original presented a robot they’d been developing over the course of several months in front of the jury. In the second round, the team’s robot competed with those from other teams in a series of matches.

The tasks change every year and for each season, the participating teams design a new robot for a specific purpose, which is announced in early September.

Sputnik Original started working on their winning robot once the tasks were announced. After developing its concept and assembling the robot over the course of the first month, they proceeded to test the system. The team kept fine-tuning the robot and learning to control it better right until their trip to Italy. According to Ilya Kutsyi, the team stayed on at the lyceum until latein the evening and practically had to be forced to go home.

Another skill the team had to work on was their grasp of the English language: in order to pass the expert interviews and simply feel comfortable at the championship, a good command of the language was crucial. As nearly none of the students could boast a high level of fluency, each of their training sessions included a rehearsal of their presentation.

In the course of developing the robot, the team also reached out to experts from ITMO’s FabLab and the university’s PhD students for advice on developing the robot's grasping system and choosing the right material for its flexible parts.

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In the second round, four teams competed on the playing field at the same time: two vs two. Their robots had to collect as many samples (small rectangular bricks) of the same color as possible and deposit them into baskets standing on the field or hanging above it. For the first 30 seconds, the robots worked autonomously; then, for 1.5 minutes, they were controlled by the teams. In the final 30 seconds, teams could complete an additional task: to hang the robot up on a high bar. Teams with the highest number of points climbed higher in the ranking and proceeded to the play-off. There, teams formed alliances with each other and played a series of elimination matches. The best teams faced each other in the final round.

“We dreamed of going to this championship! This helped us keep going, even when it was really hard or we failed. In a way, we’d been working on this goal since first grade, when we first started doing robotics. Another secret of our success is the support of our mentors. They were there to answer all our questions, hear us out, and support us. Thanks to them, we learned not only some specific skills, but also how to look for information and use it to solve the task at hand. And, of course, luck was on our side. We constantly had some small mishaps, like missing our transfer to the airport, but the organizers did everything to make us feel comfortable. And on the morning after the results were announced, the head of the championship came to congratulate us in person,” shares Roman Lukin, a member of Sputnik Original.

What next

An even bigger tournament awaits the team in the future and they have already resumed their training. In April, they will travel to Houston for the world finals. Over 7,000 teams take part in the qualifying rounds, but only 256 proceed to the finals. This year, thanks to their victory in Italy, Sputnik Original will be one of them. 

“We will be competing with the world’s best teams – only 1% of those who participated in the selection. On the one hand, this is a great motivator to keep improving our skills in preparation for the competition. On the other, it’s an additional responsibility: this is a rare chance and we have to give it our all. The team is continuing to train, make improvements to the robot, and hone their skill at controlling the system so that they can complete the tasks even faster,” says Ilya Kutsyi.

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