Natalia’s team had to program its robot to navigate a maze without knocking down any obstacles based on the images from its camera. For this task, they collected the data obtained from the camera, wrote software code, and trained a model that would allow the robot to turn or stop on its own; then, they analyzed the robot’s progress along the maze. According to Natalia Leshchenko, she really benefited from courses in programming and machine vision that she took at ITMO, as well as the tutorials and robots from the robotics lab of the Beijing Institute of Technology.
At the competition, the team had to recreate the success of their training. Together, the students tweaked their code to improve the robot’s performance. Workload was split between the team members: one team member carried the robot, another – monitored changes, and the third – processed the data. Thanks to these joint efforts, the robot completed its route without fail, ensuring the team’s gold in the Visual Confrontation category.
“The hardest part for me was the language barrier: the competition was held in Chinese for local students, so I struggled with understanding the regulations and our task – and even knowing when it was my turn, as my name was also pronounced in Chinese. I was lucky to have teammates who spoke English and helped me translate the tasks or deal with other issues. I met them at the robotics lab of the Beijing Institute of Technology, where I am an exchange student, and we had great rapport. Even when there were problems with our robot during the training, we persevered and kept going. At the competition, I got much more than just a winner’s diploma – there’s the whole experience of participating in an international competition as part of an international team, plus many hours spent at a major lab and, of course, the joy of victory!” shares Natalia Leshchenko, a third-year student of ITMO’s Faculty of Control Systems and Robotics.
China Intelligent Robot Fighting and Gaming Competition is a robotics competition organized by the Beijing Institute of Technology and the Chinese Society for Artificial Intelligence since 2008. 1,692 teams from 184 Chinese universities took part in this year’s competition, with 331 teams proceeding to the finals.