Robot World Cup Initiative (RoboCup) is a goodwill, scientific and cultural project to promote artificial intelligence, robotics and other related fields of science and technology through the organization and conduct of robotics competitions. The goal of the annual championship is to promote robotics and artificial intelligence research through spectacular and technically challenging competition.
On April 27, 2024, the regional level of the Open Russian Robotics Championship took place at School 21 in Kazan, the Republic of Tatarstan. The competition was held in two areas: RoboCup Junior for participants aged 12-18 years old and RoboCup Robot-at-Home without age limit. This year the task of the Robot-at-Home section was to clean the room from garbage after the holiday: the robot needed to sort the garbage into two categories.
Evgeny Shandarov, the Deputy Chairman of the RoboCup Organizing Committee in Russia, also shared his impressions: “The Republic of Tatarstan is one of the forward-looking regions of the country in the field of educational robotics. Therefore, of course, the RoboCup Russian National Committee was very interested in the development of this international initiative in Tatarstan.” This year Evgeny Shandarov specially visited Kazan to assess the level of the event in the republic: “The first regional qualifying round of RoboCup took place last year in Kazan. The organizer was School 21 with the support of one of the oldest universities in Russia – Kazan Federal University. This year I was able to visit the RoboCup event in Kazan personally, and I would like to note both the high level of organization and the level of preparation of the participants. I would like to add that the RoboCup program in Kazan includes competitions in the “major” League @Home, where participants have to create robots to help at home. This is an extremely promising area, both in terms of science and industry. Tatarstan is the only place in Russia where events in this League are held, which creates prerequisites for teams from other regions and countries. I am sure that RoboCup in Tatarstan has the great future!” The RoboCup Championship is one of the most authoritative robotics events in the world. In Russia, both university and school teams are able to participate in the competition. Moreover, seminars and workshops are also organized for participants.
“We’ve already organized the competition at School 21 the second time. There are several strong school teams in the field of robotics in the Republic of Tatarstan, and gradually the number of participants is increasing,” said Alexander Chetvergov, the Chief Judge of the regional level of RoboCup in the Republic of Tatarstan – “Thanks to the active participation of KFU, both schoolchildren and robotics students go in for competition. The participation of adult teams in such competitions is very useful for children, as they see the prospects of their further professional development and opportunities to continue improving their knowledge in one of the best universities of the country.”
Head of Laboratory of Intelligent Robotic Systems (LIRS) Evgeni Magid took part in the event as a representative of the RoboCup Russian National Committee. “This time the task in the @Home League was significantly more difficult than last year. It required participating teams to integrate computer vision technologies and neural network solutions into the control system, while using a multimodal approach to map construction and location the robot indoors,” shared Professor Magid.
KFU was represented by two teams from LIRS of the Institute of ITIS - “Ninja Turtles” and “La-Sarsa-De-Robo”. The first team, consisting of Artem Apurin, Bulat Abbyasov and Timur Gamberov and Niyaz Imamov, used their own ArtBul-2 robot developed as a part of the scientific research laboratory MedRo project of Priority-2030. The second team included Aidar Zagirov, Alexandra Dobrokvashina, Alexander Eryomin and Ruslan Fakhretdinov and used a ready-made Spanish robot created by PAL Robotics, for which employees and students wrote their own software and algorithms.
Three teams got to the finals of the competition. At the end of the final attempt of garbage sorting, LIRS' La-Sarsa-De-Robo team won.
“To take the first place was not possible, the confrontation was serious,” shared the captain of “Ninja Turtles” team Timur Gamberov. “We got a lot of bright impressions, the organization was on top!”
“The Robocup @Home competition is a great opportunity not only to hone your robotics skills on a real task, but also to learn something new,” said Aidar Zagirov, the captain of the winning team. “The most difficult part of the competition for us was creating and fixing the bucket for collecting things, recognizing objects - bottles and caps, and implementing the logic of approaching the object to capture it. We met these challenges, but it's still worth admitting that we didn't complete them completely. However, we won!”