The CUHK robotics team staged an exhilarating game in this year’s Robocon Hong Kong contest held in late June, with the Wonder Seed team crowned champion and the Golden Farmer team landing first runner-up. Further accolades were being bagged by both teams, with Leung Wing-hei from Wonder Seed winning best presenter award and Golden Farmer reaping the award for best performance.

The fourth consecutive win by the CUHK team was made all the more remarkable by the game’s requirement to include AI elements, which made it the most challenging competition ever. Themed “harvest day”, the contest mimicked terrace cultivation in Vietnam, where participating teams were to develop manual and fully automated robots, whilst endowing them with recognition abilities with which to detect “rice” in the field and harvest it. AI technologies, including machine learning and computer vision, were a must in developing the bots.