ITMO Youth Robotics Lab Team Wins Gold at RobotChallenge 2023 in China
The team of ITMO’s Youth Robotics Lab reigned supreme at the international RobotChallenge 2023 that was recently held in China. Robert Robotecky, the celebrated robot musician, startled the jury with his performance of several musical pieces on the concertina – while balancing on a gyro scooter.
This time, the Youth Robotics Lab assembled a truly star team: Dmitry Yakovlev, a first-year student in , and Daria Yablunina, a tenth-grade student from St. Petersburg. Both of them are weathered participants – and winners – of various highbrow contests: for Daria it’s and for Dmitry – , , and .
Igor Lositsky, the head of the lab, is the team’s long-time coach. This time, he was also assisted by Evgeny Zavarin, an engineer at the lab.
The students presented their robot contestant within the category that brings together the robots that don’t fit into any other group. In this category, three judges evaluate the idea behind the robot and its implementation, its hardware and software, as well as the robot’s presentation at the contest on a scale from 1 to 5.
Robert Robotecky, the robot musician from ITMO, performed several musical pieces on the concertina while balancing on an electric gyro scooter.
“Our project is creative and has a clear implementation. It is also highly interactive as it is controlled by gesture recognition. Everything worked perfectly and that helped us win. We were also rather popular – everyone wanted to get a picture with us,” shared Dmitry Yakovlev.
According to Dmitry, the team of the Youth Robotics Lab is planning to create a Cybertheater, a system that will synchronize all of the lab’s robots for full-scale musical performances. This currently includes (winner of , , and ), flute player ELSA (silver medal at ), guitarist Seldon (silver medal at ), as well as balalaika player Iron Henry with robot matryoshkas for support dancers (first place at ).
In the past six months, the team has successfully “taught” their robots to perform music from MIDI files, thus increasing their repertoire. Thanks to this, on the concertina, for instance, pressing and releasing the same key produces different sounds. The MIDI files contain the information on when each note has to be played, how loud and for how long. For their next endeavor, the team is planning to improve MIDI files optimization and add additional connection channels, so that the robots could perform even during Wi-Fi interference in the 2.4 Hz range.