A team from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) won the Russian stage of the Eurobot 2016 amateur robotics competition at the weekend. The team, named reSET, will now compete in the international final of the competition next month in France.
This year’s Eurobot is themed “The Beach Bots,” and in the national final, the robots were given tasks that represented building a sandcastle, collecting shells and carrying out simple actions autonomously.
The winning team with their supervisor and mentor, and Skoltech president Alexander Kuleshov in the centre. Photo: Skoltech.
The seven-person reSET team was supervised by Dzmitry Tsetserukou, head of Skoltech’s Robotics Lab, and mentored by Alexei Gonnochenko, a project manager at the Skolkovo Foundation’s Robocentre. The other teams taking part in the final were Terabyte - another Russian team, which took second place - and Miu from the University of Novi Sad in Serbia.
Tsetserukou said he was impressed by the standard of the competition, in particular from Miu.
“It says one thing: we in Russia must greatly improve the level and quality of robotics. Today’s participants of Eurobot are tomorrow’s technical elite, which will create the country’s economy,” he said.
The professor praised the team members and their mentor Gonnochenko.
“In six months, they created from scratch an incredible team capable of winning by a large margin and representing Russia at the international level,” he said.
The Skoltech team was competing on home turf, as the institute was hosting the final. It was also one of the competition’s organisers, together with the national organizing committee of Eurobot and the Skolkovo Foundation’s Robocentre.
Skoltech president Alexander Kuleshov attended the final, and did not hide his support for his institute’s team. “I wish all the teams luck, but I’d like to see the Skoltech team win,” he said.
The competition comprised two age categories: Eurobot Junior for younger participants, and Eurobot Open – in which reSET was competing – for older students. In total, 36 teams from universities, schools and children’s educational organisations took part in the competitions, in which participants build their own autonomous robot to perform various tasks.
The international Eurobot contest was founded in France in 1998 with the aim of fostering interest in robotics among young people.
This year’s international final will take place on June 11-12 in Kremlin-Bicêtre, France. Gonnochenko said reSET stood a good chance of making it into the top five European teams.