HKUST Robotics Team is the robotics team of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. It consists of 3 sub-teams that compete in the ABU Robocon contest, MATE ROV Competition and the Freescale Cup Intelligent Car Racing.
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HKUST Robotics Team is affiliated to the Center for Global Community Engagement and their Director is Prof. Tim Woo. The HKUST Robotics Team has students the various schools of HKUST, namely the School of Engineering, School of Science and School of Business and Management.
History
The HKUST Robotics Team was founded with intentions to encourage Engineering students to take part in a variety of external robotics competitions, outside their regular curriculum in the early years of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. One such popular external competition is the Robocon Hong Kong Competition, which the team has participated in since 2004.
To benefit more students from the new learning experience, the HKUST Robotics Team expanded in 2010, representing HKUST in multiple competitions, namely the ABU Robocon Competition, the MATE Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) competition and the Freescale Cup Intelligent Car Racing Competition.
Besides robotics competition, HKUST Robotics Team participated in numerous presentation competitions and entrepreneurship competitions.
In 2013, HKUST Robotics Team has become involved in different community projects and services, such as guiding visually imparied students to build their own underwater robots, organizing advanced underwater robot training's and Arduino introduction workshops to secondary school students.
Robocon
ABU Robocon is an Asia-Pacific based university level robotics competition, founded in 2002 by Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union. The contest aims to create friendship among young people with similar interests who will lead their countries in the 21st century, as well as help advance engineering and broadcasting technologies in the region. The event is broadcast in many countries through ABU member broadcasters. In order to become the representative of the country, teams must participate in regional competition and get the championship every year. In Hong Kong, the regional competition is Robocon Hong Kong.
Each year the competition has different topics, but generally speaking two or more robots must be used to complete the tasks. One of the robots would be manual control while the others are automatic. The best robots usually weight more than 10 kg and span in one square meter area. To build the robots, contestants, who are restricted to be undergraduate students, must possess rich knowledge in programming, mechanical design and electronic circuit design.
MATE ROV
The HKUST Robotics Teams participate in the MATE ROV Competition for the first time in 2011. That year's team was co-supervised by Prof. Zexiang Li and Prof. Tim Woo of the ECE Department
The MATE ROV Competition challenges K-12, community college, and university students from all over the world to design and build ROVs to tackle missions modeled after real-life scenarios from the marine environment. The competition’s class structure of beginner, intermediate, and advanced complements the education pipeline by providing students with the opportunity to build upon their skills – and the application of those skills – as they engineer increasingly more complex ROVs for increasingly more complex mission tasks.
The MATE competition requires students to think of themselves as “entrepreneurs” and transform their teams into companies that manufacture, market, and sell products. In addition to engineering their ROVs, the students are required to prepare technical reports, poster displays, and engineering presentations that are delivered to working professionals who serve as competition judges.
Intelligent Car Racing
“Freescale Cup” Intelligent Car Racing has been organized by the semiconductor company, Freescale, for nine years. Over the years, it became a popular robotics event in mainland China and aroused attention from students in related disciplines. It aimed to encourage students to apply circuit design, mechanics knowledge, embedded software programming, and control theories in smart model car racing. The fastest car to complete the track without derailing wins the competition. According to the sensors used, teams were divided into three categories: Optical Group, Electro-magnetic Group and Camera Balance Group. Teams from the Optical Group were required to identify the track by processing analog data obtained from linear CCD's, while those from the Camera Balance Group relied on image processing through a camera with an extra requirement – standing up and racing with only two wheels. Finally, teams from the Electro-Magnetic Group used wireless sensors to detect the location of a signal wire located underneath the racetrack.