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Students compete in World Robot Olympiad in Taipei

More than 150 teams from all school levels in northern Taiwan joined a preliminary contest of this year's World Robot Olympiad (WRO) at Taipei's National Taiwan Science Education Center yesterday.

Elementary school students accounted for a majority of participants this year.

The topic assigned to elementary school students was to design an automatically operating car that is able to run on a designated track on a table with roadblocks, tunnels, and pebbles placed along the way.

A balloon was also placed at the end of the track. Each run was considered a complete success if the needle mounted on the front of the car pierced the balloon.

After each topic was announced, participants were given about an hour to assemble the components.

They also had to do programming on the spot, which had to take into consideration all the possible scenarios the vehicles would encounter along the way and calculate the angle and speed the cars needed to overcome each hurdle. For example, the car had to be able to back up and make a turn in the right direction whenever it hit the track end or a road block.

Each team was given two rounds to try their cars. The performance was evaluated based on several criteria, such as the time the car took to reach the track's end and whether the balloon actually popped.

Fifth grader Eugene Wong (翁以繁) shouted "Yay" when his car popped the balloon in the second round. His car made it to the end of the track in 47 seconds.

"I feel great," he said after the successful tryout, adding that he spent 10 minutes programming and 20 minutes assembling his car.

Another fifth grader, Jason Fan (范育嘉), also succeeded in the second tryout.

He said he elevated the optical sensor of the car after it failed the first time. In the second, his car made it to the end in 25 seconds.

Wu Guo-dong (吳國棟), associate professor of industrial engineering and management at National Taipei University of Technology, has been a WRO referee for eight years.

He said the competition mainly tested the students' knowledge about some basic mechanical theories and object-oriented programming (OOP).

OOP enables programmers to create a new object that retains many of the features of existing objects.

Competitions among junior high and senior high school students are scheduled for today.

The topic for junior high school and senior high school students is a walking robot that will zigzag its way like a train operating on the Alishan Forest Railway.

Organizers said that the top three winners of the national contest will represent Taiwan at the 2007 WRO in November, which will be held in Taipei.
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