A journey with bots
“We give our students a free hand—it’s for them to decide how good they want the bots to be, whether they want to fix the issues we point out. Almost always, though, they take our advice and work painstakingly to perfect the model, at times toiling through the nights,” says Billy Yip, team leader of the University’s student robotics team. In the Robocon Hong Kong Contest held in late June, the CUHK team took the scene by storm, with the Lord of the Rings team scooping the championship and the Best Engineering Award. Ring Slinger, a 20-strong neophyte team, also made it to the semi-final and finished fourth.
Members of the robotics team come from a medley of disciplines and years of study. On an encouraging note, the Lord of the Rings team had been placed fourth in last year’s Robocon local contest, and together with the winning team, they’d notched up gold in the subsequent international contest. This time, they have upped their game and aimed high—a strategy that proved to work well and seal another triumph.
“We were quite ambitious in goal-setting; back then, we were not talking about finishing the tasks, but how quickly we could get them done. Only by acting fast can one stand a better chance of winning.” Yip thinks highly of the students’ capability and commitment in building bots—from last September through the contest, they have come up with solutions to myriad issues they encountered, while juggling assignments and exams.
The first contest after the pandemic, this year’s Robocon competition, held by the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation, saw quite a few new faces. Due probably to a lack of social and group activities during the pandemic years, at the outset, the communication skills and resilience of novice teammates left much to be desired. Taking Yip and veteran teammates’ counsel, members of the new team Ring Slinger lowered their expectations and resolved to work at their own pace and enjoy the game. Their stable performance catapulted them to the fourth place, much to everyone’s delight.
To Yip, every bit of the thrilling matches staged by the two teams was worth reminiscing. In this year’s Angkor Wat and flowers-themed contest, teams were tasked with designing rabbit and elephant robots, which were to toss rings into the poles on site. The team which managed to place their rings atop eight poles would be the winner. The final against the University of Hong Kong saw two teams engaged in frantic back and forth over five poles in the centre, and it was only far into one minute that the Lord team occupied all poles. The presto tempo of competition, ingenuity of design, and improvising of strategies by each team left every audience member in bated breath and in awe.
At the tail end of August, Yip will lead the team to Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where they will represent Hong Kong in the Asia-Pacific Robot Contest and play other winning teams. After a break, they will work hard to improve their design and learn from other international teams, hoping to secure the Grand Prix award and continue the winning trail.
