"We want to enter this contest!" When students of the Montefiore Institute came to tell him about what they wanted, Professor Bernard Boigelot didn’t take long to answer yes. "Eurobot", the contest in question, is an international robotics contest for young people, students, or members of robotics clubs. The professor, a teacher of informatics, saw immediately the pedagogical advantages that their entry into the contest might provide.

They first got their feet wet last year. They won fifth place in the Belgian competition – not good enough to go on to the international final (three teams per country is the maximum). However, this year Frida the robot from the ULg won second prize in the Belgian championship (28 teams competed), and this meant that the Montefiore team was assured of a place in the final in Heidelberg in May where they came 27th among the 50 teams in contention. A good result for their first participation.

The basic principle of the Eurobot contest is simple: a robot built by young people in teams must perform using its own power supply, and must make its own decisions. In other words, it must accomplish without help a series of tasks for which it has been programmed. No radio-controlled commands can be issued, and no intervention of any kind by its builders is allowed once the robot has been released into the competition arena. Each match pits two robots against each other for 90 seconds. During this time, they must accomplish a series of tasks, and success brings points with it. The robot that accumulates the most points is declared the winner.

Mission to Mars

The tasks the robots have to do change every year. Last year, the task was to pick up trash (plastic bottles, aluminum cans, etc.) and to place them in specific containers. This year’s theme was “Mission to Mars.” Participating robots had to be capable of picking up “rock samples” that represented proof that there is life on Mars. These samples were represented by red and blue tennis balls. But in order to be brought back to Earth, they had to be protected, and thus placed in two types of containers (located at the perimeter of the arena): these were supposed to be refrigerated containers in which samples could be stored as is, and a standard container in which samples were to be packed in ice (represented by white balls). In this case each sample ball had to be “framed” by two white balls, a more difficult exercise that could win even more points. Last trick: the robot had to be able to dodge its opponent.

About ten students and five young researchers worked with Professor Boigelot to build Frida. "What distinguishes us from other teams,” Bernard Boigelot explains, “is that we designed a robot in the most general way possible; the specific requirements of the contest thus only required us to simplify things. That allowed us to re-use most of the robot when we were trying to adapt it to the tasks that had to be accomplished in this or that contest.” Apart from the element of play, which is certainly not something we should neglect, the purpose of participation is obviously educational. “The construction of such a robot takes about 6 months, and it is a lot of help in our class work,”Boigelot said.“Courses in mechanics, informatics, and electronics are involved in a practical way in this activity. As a system, Frieda is quite complex. She contains the equivalent of 12 computers; all the electronic cards were designed and built in our laboratories. We had to design systems for detection, grasping, moving around. All these elements came into play in final student projects.”