IESL ROBOGAMES 2020

IESL RoboGames 2020 was held on the 28th of November 2020 as the first ever virtual robotic competition in Sri Lanka. RoboGames has been a key event of Institute of Engineers, Sri Lanka (IESL) since 2013 organized by The Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa in collaboration with the IT & Sectional committee of the IESL. Sri Lanka Telecom PLC has been powering up the event since 2017. RoboGames aims at promoting and recognizing the talents and skills of the next generation of professionals in a rapidly advancing area like robotics. This time the competition was based on Webots, a robot simulation software platform that offers a prototyping environment for users to access necessary virtual hardware and test their programming capability. The two categories of competitors, namely school category and university category competed with their mobile robots in a maze of a city to complete a task themed on Covid-19 pandemic. The competitors designed a virtual mobile robot with necessary sensors and control and programmed it to navigate through the maze to reach a pre-defined destination from a common initial position. The robot had to avoid the Covid infected pedestrians in the maze and reach as many sanitizer points as possible to score points along the path. University category was challenged to use computer vision-based navigation while the school category was allowed to react to markers placed on the maze. A series of successful online workshops and awareness sessions were conducted to introduce the concept of robotics and prepare the competitors. RoboGames 2020 was successful with registrations of over 20 teams in School Category and 44 teams in University Category spanning many districts across the country thus breaking the barrier of lack of knowledge and facilities for robotic fans and newbies. Four teams from the School category and 7 teams from the University category were through to the final. Eng. Vidula Hasaranga, Eng. Rusiru Boralugoda and Eng. Kushan Sharma were the panel of industry experts at the grand finale and the competition concluded with an exhaustive evaluation to review code quality, robot design, and the competitors’ understanding and creativity with algorithms in addition to the simulation score. Team Trix from Maliyadeva College, Kurunegala won the championship in the School Category while Team Circuit Breakers from University of Moratuwa won the University Category.