NTU Team Wins Grand Prize at 2018 Robot Competition

Robots can be far more useful when working in tandem with people than when working by themselves, and NTU puts the “robot” back in robotics to elicit more future potentials. The 2018 Robot Competition was held at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center on Friday, August 31. The event was hosted jointly by the Industrial Development Bureau of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Precision Machinery Research & Development Center, in response to the government's campaign to promote the smart robot industry here.

The competition was fierce among the talented competitors from across Taiwan. In the end, the Grand Prize went to the team led by Prof. Ren-Chyuan Luo (羅仁權) of NTU’s Graduate Institute of Electrical Engineering (GIEE) and the Center of Excellence in Intelligent Robotics and Automation Research (NTU-iCeiRA). The unanimous favorite of the judges turned out to be a smart robot that was developed, designed, and assembled from scratch by the NTU team.

The Robot Competition was aimed to stimulate the students’ expertise and creativity in designing and developing robots, by challenging the contestants to think creatively to come up with solutions to meet the needs of and overcome the problems faced by industry. At this year’s event, the contestants’ smart robots vied in dramatic settings and were tasked with problems in real-life scenarios. The student teams responded by giving free rein to their creativity in the race to design innovative, practical, and feasible robots.

The 2018 Robot Competition’s jury consisted of top management from local industry – VP-level and above – as well as renowned university professors. The NTU team’s success in beating the strong challenges of the strong teams and impressing the judges in the competition was commendable. Moreover, the competition opened the student participants’ eyes to further possibilities and potentials of robotic applications that are poised to revolutionize human life.

This article will also be featured in No. 68 of NTU Highlights (October, 2018).