Robofest is a renowned robot competition that has started from 2000. Hosted by Lawrence Technological University in the United States, over 20,000 people have competed from 14 different countries in the last 17 years. Bae Jong-hak and Yoo Ho-yeon (Robot Engineering, 3rd year) have worked together as a team in 2017 Robofest that was held from June 1st to 3rd in Florida, and won the Vision Centric Challenge.
 

Back to back winners
 
Team Linker, consisted of Bae and Yoo have won the 2016 Robofest last year as well. It is the same competition with different rules. “They host the competition in the U.S. in June, while in Korea, it is held in October,” explained Bae. This time, Bae had the full support from the Department of Robot Engineering. “Our department has generously provided us with the opportunity to travel to the U.S. for free and also helped us out with the materials needed to create the robots as well. Special thanks to professor Han Jae-kwon for helping us out with the robots,” added Bae.
 

Team Linker has received such a good feedback thanks to the internal software of their robot. The objective of the competition was the robot to perceive the numbers and equations through the camera and eventually reach a certain result out of it. “We put a lot of effort on the software so that when the robot gets stuck with the equations, it could move back a little instead of standing there still,” said Bae. He explained that Team Linker has prepared for the competition for 3 months and it took about one month to create the robot. “ Software of the robot took longer for us because it was more important than the hardware.”
 

I – Robot
 
After studying one more year to retake the college entrance examination, Bae found his interests in creating robots. “One of my childhood dream was to create a robot on my own,” recalled Bae. He explained that Department of Robot Engineering would be a perfect fit for those not interested in particular field of study. Since robotics requires knowledge from diverse fields, students are able to acquire engineering skills that could be applied in any type of studies. “We learn about diverse types of  integrated studies and then move on focus on a certain field that catches your attention. For me, it was image recognition. I gained more interest after studying it during the competition,” said Bae.
 
In the future, Bae wishes to study more about the robots and image recognition in graduate school. “I see a lot of possibilities from the robots in that we could have a better future with them,” commented Bae. He wishes to create a home robot that would be able to handle useful tasks like Jarvis from Iron man. Bright future seems to lie in front of the winners of Robofest Vision Centric Challenge.
 
 
Kim Seung-jun        nzdave94@hanyang.ac.kr
Photos by Kim Youn-soo