Gadgetory

then our e this is the world's biggest most complex and completely over-the-top student Robotics Competition over five days students from 200 universities around China compete in front of tens of thousands of fans while millions more watch online the whole thing takes place inside this colossal Stadium in Shenzhen an arena that usually hosts the country's biggest rock stars it's all being funded by DJing innovation science and technology company you probably know them as DJI or at least you know their flagship product the now iconic phantom drone the students are competing not only for cash prizes but a chance to audition their talents for jobs at DJI DJI on the other hand wants to use this competition to become the most successful revives company in the world this is Robo masters this competition is like it's like a battle between robots we make some would make some robots to fight against each other each man puts two teams of robots against each other the unit's maneuver around the field collecting power-ups and ammunition ideally without tipping over the goal is to reach the opposing teams base station the robots can shoot at each other with cannons aiming for small pressure-sensitive plates enough hits on those plates and the bot automatically shuts off the teams can also successfully deplete the enemy base station of all its health and win a sudden death so each team will do their own robot and the robot is many consists of three systems so the first one will be the driving system which has a four wheels we saw which enables the car to move around the second part will be the weapon system and the last part is actually the charging system provided by the organizer the competition eji the charging system consists of different components the sensors to detect coming damage that's one part and there's a sensors for monitoring speed is another part and we also have another cameras so the view of the camera will be transmitted back to the operation room where the operators will only use this first-person view to move their robot our team has eight robots including four infantry a here a hero a drone and a base and also a station that can provide bullets like a recharging station for this one is an infantry it has a cannon and it can shoot bullets bullets coming from here and it can shoot out there the small infantry robots can only fire little rubber pellets while the drone in the hero can use golf balls doing much more damage with every strike golf balls are tough to get and that's on purpose in order to access them teams have to design a mechanical system for collecting and launching them efficiently teams that were reliably able to get the golf balls were consistently able to take out the enemy and win the match some teams created smaller faster hero robots and relied on their drones to collect golf balls using the aircraft to arm their hero or bomb the enemy base others built large hair robots that could scale a central island climbing over a sea of spikes teams developed a wide variety of mechanical solutions everything from arms and vacuums to wheels on stilts the mechanical engineering that went into the tournament was always a big hit with the crowd but the really high-tech stuff was actually happening out of sight in the software we forced students to design base robot as fully autonomous so the base robot can shoot 17 millimeter plastic balls as well but it Hecht's who do is automatically in this way we encourage students to involve those high technologies the high technology is referring to is something called computer vision it's the same kind of tech that lets self-driving cars navigate roads computers must be able to scan incoming visual data recognize what it sees and then perform actions based off that information so for an autonomous vehicle if it comes to a stop sign knows to stop at Robo masters computer vision was used to enable an autonomous base allowing it to identify the enemy and return fire without human help I think the vision is really the key to enable new application of robots so that's why we want to integrate this kind of technology into our robotic competitions that's Frank Wang he's the CEO of DJI and the mastermind behind this competition and the big feature of their latest drones you guessed it computer vision the phantom 4 can see the world around it and autonomously avoid crashes that drone and DJ eyes new handheld camera stabilizer can also identify and automatically track subjects keeping them in frame even if you're not moving a muscle but Frank sees this technology as the future for much more than drones we will face the u.s. division in a gym itself but later we can expand to other applications like maybe sometimes autonomous driving sometimes agriculture also known as the cherry-picking these kind of things lots of human very labor-intensive things and can be replaced by cheap and the fishing enable the robots over the last three years DJI has emerged from obscurity to dominate the booming market for consumer drones but if it wants to make the jump beyond quadcopters to driverless cars and farming robots it's going to need to compete against much larger companies the students at Robo masters are hoping to score jobs at DJI for the company the stakes are reversed its battling with much larger tech Titans when top talent and some of technology's hottest fields computer vision and autonomous navigation the 200 universities competing in Robo masters were in effect training their students to work with DJI products and they were bringing these passionate students right to DG eyes doorstep that's the logical explanation anyway the one a public company would give if his investors raised a stink about the cost of putting on a big fancy over-the-top tournament but for Robo masters creator the real goal is about sharing his passion for robotics with the new generation lots of all people can be become famous like a sports star I do not think other than entertain people they do not have creates too much of it but I think if we can put engineering and entertainment together not only they can entertain they can educate lots of people even they are not becoming superstar they are very good engineer they are very good innovator maybe some of them become entrepreneurs we just have to make something exciting for people to watch we're trying to let robot competition and the robot engineers be noticed by general public because you early robotics engineers the only working laughs and they build very they do rocket science but the general public cannot appreciate what they are doing you could see the way the tournament was designed to make stars out of nerdy teenagers the competition featured live feeds of them operating their robots documentary films on their preparations and even an anime series that turn contestants into action heroes Robo masters made these students larger-than-life I was pushed to this in front of the spotlight and I was invited in the center the first time I see the poster I was also a bit shocked it's amazing to me I below is amazing to a lot of other people's or souls especially young children if they see these kind of things you must be like whoa I'm going to do something like this when I grow up I really encourage more girls to try it could Robo masters ever be as popular as a mainstream sport well kids one day aspire to be engineers the way they aspire to be rock stars hmm that remains to be seen but in the final moments of the competition when the champions successfully use their hero robot and its golf ball cannon to take down the opposing base station and the crowd went wild it sure felt like a roaring success