How Russian guys win in robotics competitions

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

It is not the first year that young Russian robotics have won prizes at international competitions. We spoke with three winners of the RoboCup competition.

The pandemic has accelerated the introduction of robots into all spheres of life - it seems that people all over the world are thinking about drones that will replace couriers, industrial robots that will go to work and not get sick, and medical robots that can take care of people with COVID-19.

Russia is not far behind: according to the report of the International Federation of Robotics, the country took second place in the world ranking of manufacturers of service robots. It is not the first year that teams from Russia have won prizes at the World Robot Olympiad and at the RoboCup competitions.

1. Oleg Marchenko, 21 years old

First place at the World Robot Olympiad 2017, main senior category, Novosibirsk, team Binom (League of Robots)

Oleg Marchenko - Press photo

In 2014, I got acquainted with the League of Robots, began to participate in competitions and Olympiads in robotics. The selection in Russia is multi-stage: first the local (city) stage, then the regional, then the All-Russian Olympiad, then we have the federal training camps and the world level - the World Robot Olympiad.

In 2014, at the selection in Russia, we became the eleventh team and did not make it to the top ten to continue participating in the competition. In 2015, we already got into the national team, went to the world Olympics, this was a serious reason not to give up what we were doing. The first time we were not even in the middle of the rating, we ended up at the end. And they began to prepare for the next world Olympiad in 2016.

Fully autonomous robots should perform there. The team designs them in advance, programs them and releases them on the field in an autonomous mode, where the robot itself moves, orientates itself with the help of sensors, and manipulates objects. We cannot approach the robot and somehow influence its movement.

That is, everything that you could do, you did before. And so in 2016 we are in the finals at the World Olympiad. The performance of our robot begins, around a huge crowd of people, hundreds of cameras. The robot starts up, starts moving, everything goes well and at some point it just drives off the line.

This has never happened in training, we did not expect it. The whole room gasped. We went home, and, of course, we were very worried, at some point we decided to quit everything, but then we sat down and analyzed the whole situation. We did not foresee that robotics differs from programming in that the external world drastically affects the situation.

Our task as developers and designers was to make the robot ready for external environmental influences: in 2017, we worked on this all year. We shot with flash, kicked the robot during the attempt, we wanted to be sure that no external force would affect our result.

In 2017, the stars came together at the world Olympiad, we were as ready as possible, the task was not easy, but we understood that our competitors could not achieve that level of performance even at the world Olympiad. And in 2017 we became world champions.

After that we took a break, entered the university, but in 2018 we decided to repeat the success and went to the World Olympiad in Thailand. Everything turned out not so successfully, we got into the top 16 teams of the senior category, did not become the leaders, the competition was already going on there for a split second, and our robot was behind by a couple of seconds. However, we were awarded the nomination for the best solution in the category, which is very nice.

2. Vasily Dunaev, 18 years old

First place at the World Robot Olympiad 2018, category Open, Senior High St. Petersburg, a team from the St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO) and the Presidential Physics and Mathematics Lyceum No. 239

Vasily Dunaev (second from left) - Press photo

There are several categories in the World Roboto Olympiad (WRO). For example, one part is when you have a clear task and you compete in who will do it faster and better. But there is also a creative category. It has the following format - you are given an exhibition cell 2 by 2 meters and 5 minutes of time to present your project.

When you have a clear, specific task, it allows you to gather, think in one direction, and many original, non-standard solutions appear. And in the creative category there is still a competitive spirit, but you are allowed to think creatively, to do whatever comes into your head.

It was not the first time that I won first place in the creative category at the BPO, we participated back in 2014. The Olympics were held in Sochi, and I took second place in the junior category. And only in 2018, we took first place in Thailand at the BPO of the senior category.

Then we took first place, presenting a robot that autonomously picked strawberries from a garden. It sounds simple, but in fact we had a camera, the robot using a neural network found the berries, determined their state, loaded it all into the database, the user ordered this berry for himself through the application, the robot rode and picked the berries with the help of a soft silicone pneumatic grip, drove to the drone, the drone took off.

It seems simple, but in fact the result of a lot of work, a lot of technologies have been brought together. Not only did it need to be made to work at the same time, it also needed to synchronize completely different technologies.

After that, we created a project for RoboCup in Stage - this is a humanoid robot girl who played the flute. The robot, aka the girl Elsa, really plays the flute, blows, and holds the holes on the flute with her fingers. She can also hear the chords played by the guitarist, recognize them and compose her own melody in this key, and then perform it together with the person. That is also a very strong project from a technological point of view.

Such projects develop imagination, this helps us to seriously advance in various fields of robotics. For example, soft robotics [which uses flexible, easily deformable materials that allow robots to adapt to different tasks - from modeling aquatic creatures to performing surgery] is a very interesting and promising area right now.

3. Rodion Anisimov, 21 years old

Second place for, student of the Moscow State Technical University. Bauman

Rodion Anisimov - Press photo

I study at the CM-7 department of mechatronics-robotics, I am the captain of the Bauman Robotics Club team. We competed with the team at the RoboCup competitions. There are 2 categories: students participate in the senior one, and there are 3 divisions in it. First and foremost, where RoboCup began is football of humanoid robots, the second is where a robot must solve problems in a real living room, for example, last year there was a task in a supermarket to collect a basket of groceries.

And the third part of the competition, in which we participate, is where a storage room is simulated, in which a service robot must place some objects in the correct way on the tables. All objects initially lie in a random way, and a task is sent to the robot, which indicates from which table to which table the object should be transferred, while the objects themselves are nuts, screws, that is, something related to mechanics. There are also side tasks - for example, a robot must throw a suitable part into a hole.

We are engaged in these competitions for the second year, respectively, for two years in a row we took second place in them, yielding only to the team from Singapore. I like that this event is more focused on the development of robotics as a scientific field. Tasks are given knowledge-intensive, professional, many different areas are used in the implementation.

In the tasks, a full-fledged navigation program is used, when a map of the room is built using a laser rangefinder and the robot must navigate on this map. A stereo vision camera is used, with the help of which objects are detected, and all this is done using neural networks.

During the days of the competition, the participating teams exchange experience, talk about technical solutions, and all the code that is used in robots is laid out in the public domain. This is done specifically for the development of the industry. Different knowledge is used here: probability theory, linear algebra, mathematical analysis - all together.

Apart from RoboCup, I am also involved in other projects. For example, last year we went to China for a conference with a project on the application of Internet of Things in service robotics. There, for a service humanoid robot, we made a complete control system and an interface so that a person could interact with this robot.