Local robots put to the test in competition

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Racing against the clock, Spidey moved slowly along a narrow corridor before hitting a white wall. After pondering which way he would take to get to the fire, he managed to extinguish a flame that had been burning for some time.

Now, he had to complete the daunting task of finding his way back to the spot where he had made his first move. However, after three steps, the odd-looking creature twitched before making his last move.

No, the scene is not from a new Spiderman movie. In fact, it was a mishap that transpired during a robot competition organized by the Ministry of National Education on Sunday, and the above mentioned hero was a six-legged, battery-powered robot manufactured by students from Surabaya-based Petra Christian University.

Spidey, properly written "SPY-D", failed to take part in the subsequent "smart robot" contest after failing to accomplish its mission assigned in a preliminary contest.

SPY-D's defeat paved the way for a far superior robot designed by students from Gadjah Mada University, Klepon.

Named after a traditional Javanese snack, Klepon was a two- wheeled robot whose designers expected to be capable of accomplishing more complicated tasks.

Entered in the "expert" category, Klepon was programmed to extinguish fire from a candle, identify a baby doll equipped with light-emitting diodes functioning as a decoy and find its way back.

During a rehearsal, Klepon managed to detect the heat source with an ultraviolet sensor and send electronic signals to a mini- fan that later created a light breeze, enough to put out the fire from the candle.

However, in the contest, Klepon was seen to be at a loss over how to find its way to the heat source and repeatedly bumped into wooden walls, part of a maze that functioned as a circuit.

"Technically speaking, we were ready to join the contest, but there have been numerous nontechnical constraints that hampered the way for Klepon to accomplish its mission," Vidiansyah, team member from the Yogyakarta-based university told The Jakarta Post.

UGM entered four teams in the annual competition.

The third-year student said that team members had fed information about the maze passages into Klepon's brain, microcontrol-based software, so that the robot could move about freely and executed its given tasks.

Virdiansyah said that it took a month for his team to build the Rp 2 million robot, with almost half of the period being used to design the robot's brain.

A contest judge, Muljo Widodo, said that in the "smart robot" category there had been an increase in the number of devices that could accomplish the assigned tasks.

"Now we have seven robots that can accomplish the given mission of both putting out the flames and going up a ramp to find a baby doll. Last year there were only three," he said.

In another contest that involved less "brainy" robots, participating teams were required to command a combination of intelligent machines in a basketball-like game.

In three minutes, the robots had to put balls of different colors into canisters; whichever managed to lob the most balls was declared winner and could go on to the next stage.

After a tight contest, Maximum_Balance, a robot designed by students from the University of Indonesia (UI) challenged the defending champion, ASKAF.i, designed by students from the Surabaya Institute of Technology, in the final round.

It later transpired that ASKAF.i was too strong a contestant for Maximum_Balance, although it took the UI students six months to laboriously build the robot.

Ridho Alpha Kusuma, a Maximum_Balance mechanic, said that his team spent Rp 10 million on building the robots. "We purchased parts for the robot from Glodok," Ridho said, referring to the largest electronics market in the capital.