Team of ASU Outstrips Top Russian Universities at Competitions in Robotics

Students of Astrakhan State University have achieved worthy results at the national stage of EUROBOT 2018.

Let us remark that the only rep of Astrakhan Region at this event was the team “A-ROBOT” of ASU. Our students reached the semi-final, thus outstripping reps of Russia’s largest universities, e.g. Bauman Moscow State Technical University and Don State Technical University.

Our team included five people. Its captain, Pavel Tamkov, studied at our Regional School Technopark when he was a schoolboy; then he entered our University to study Robotics. ASU has all the necessary conditions to provide its students’ professional growth. Besides, our experienced professors and our labs help get prepared for such large-scale events as EUROBOT. “I watched competitions of the international stage online”, Pavel says, “Our robot is definitely not inferior to participants from other countries – Spain, Britain, and so on”. As he adds, to claim a victory, one should start getting ready as soon as the official web site publishes the rules of the upcoming competition. It is usually October, i.e. the participants have about seven months to make a robot and run a number of tests. Just as professional sportspeople, the robots have to train under students’ continuous supervision. To check and debug them, our lab was equipped with a game field identical to the EUROBOT one.

Quite uneasy trials awaited the participants and their robots at EUROBOT 2018. An area 2*3 meters represented a city of robots, where two teams had to carry out particular tasks, e.g. filter water, whose role was played by balls of different colors, or construct a building from cubes. “There are many elements on the field”, Pavel Tamkov tells us, “and there was uncertainty in their total number, so it was uneasy to cope”. Only 100 seconds were allowed to pass thru a test. Then the referees added scores for each successful test and declared the total scores.

The held competitions provided valuable experience for our people. Our team showed good results and has all the chances to gain a victory next year. “We’ll start getting prepared this summer”, Pavel says. “In particular, we are going to develop a beacon localization system to trace our robots’ movements”.