On November 25, the 30th SNU Robocon took place in the Haedong Idea Factory (Building 39), together with a ceremony celebrating the 30th anniversary of the contest and the Creative Engineering Design, a mandatory course for mechanical engineering majors. Each year, students who take this course display their final creations at Robocon, a robotics competition held at the end of the academic year. The faculty, TAs, and first-year students of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, along with entrepreneurs in the mechanical engineering industry, gathered to watch the contestants taking part in matches with robots of their own making.

The 30th SNU Robocon, November 25, 2022

A 30 Year History of the SNU Robocon

It was in 1993 that late professor Chong Nam Chu first opened a course of this kind, at the time called Engineering Design. The purpose of this course was to help students new to the major accumulate new experiences designing, assembling, and operating machines on their own. Professor Chu also thought that a robot contest at the end of the year would allow all students who took the course to compete and cooperate with each other. That year the Department of Mechanical Engineering held the first SNU Robocon at the Cultural Center. Winners were eligible to participate in an international robot contest alongside students from MIT, Cambridge University, and Tokyo Institute of Technology. Since then, the Engineering Design course and Robocon have successfully continued. When South Korea hosted the 11th International Robocon in 2000, 228 students participated in SNU Robocon, hitting a record high in the number of participants.

Starting in 2020, SNU Robocon was put on hold for two years due to COVID-19 and the Creative Engineering Design course was conducted online. According to Professor Kyu-jin Cho (Department of Mechanical Engineering) who taught the course during the pandemic, although students had to create their own robots without any professional apparatu, they were passionate in showing their creative spirit.

Currently, Creative Engineering Design is compulsory for first-year students of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Students taking the course first learn the basic principles of mechanics and mechanical design through lectures and exercises. Based on this knowledge, they team up to create a robot to solve the assigned problem and compete in SNU Robocon. Each year’s winners are qualified to compete in International Robocon.

In the final round of the 30th Robocon, all four rows of chairs prepared for the audience were filled with eager spectators. Professor Howon Lee (Department of Mechanical Engineering), who taught Creative Engineering Design in 2022, introduced the judges, and Professor Sung-hoon Ahn (Department of Mechanical Engineering) and Professor Yoo Suk Hong (Dean of College of Engineering) gave a welcome speech and a congratulatory message. Afterwards, Professor Kyu-jin Cho explained the history of the Creative Engineering Design course and SNU Robocon, and Young Ho Chu, Professor Chu’s son and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was awarded a plaque of appreciation by proxy.

Past interview with late professor Chong Nam Chu (Source: YouTube - SNU CED ROBOCON)

Restore the Flooded Gwanak Campus!

The final round of Robocon commenced at 4:40 PM. For this contest, a replica was made to simulate last summer’s extreme rain that flooded the campus. The task for the students was to create robots that could save people stuck in inundated buildings. An imaginary Student Center, refuge, and garbage dump were set up, and there were blocks representing people, relief goods, and garbage. Each team brought two robots: a rescue robot and a transporting robot. The rescue robot collected the blocks and handed them over to the transporting robot. Then the transporting robot had to send each block (people, relief goods, or garbage) to an allotted place. Better performance of the transporting robot led to more points for the team. Between the two competing teams, the team that received more points within the time limit was crowned winner.

A total of 132 students who took the course split into 28 teams and took part in the preliminary rounds. Team Zero and Team Be9 Rescuers entered the finals. Team Zero was the best bet for the title, as 15 out of 20 teams that were eliminated in the previous rounds predicted that Team Zero would be the champion. Team Be9 Rescuers stayed up for five nights before the final round, working hard to fine tune their robots.

Team Zero(left) and Team Be9 Rescuers(right) during the final round of the 30th SNU Robocon

As the final round commenced, the two teams shouted out their slogans, showing their will to win. At the starting signal, each team’s robots moved busily to carry the blocks. 28 seconds into the match, Team Zero’s robot scored five points. A minute after the start, the transporting robot and one component of the rescue robot of Team Be9 Rescuers malfunctioned. This was not surprising for the robots, since they had participated in eight matches that day before the final round. The robots of Be9 Rescuers nonetheless made full use of the rest of their components and did not give up in their attempts to transport the blocks. Although the number of blocks that each team’s rescue robots collected was almost equal, Team Be9 Rescuers could not score any points as they were not able to correct the malfunctioning of their transporting robot. The result was a clean victory for Team Zero.

Robots being operated to restore an imaginary, flooded SNU campus

After the final round, the winner Team Zero, composed of members Jun-su Kim, Su-bin Lee, Jin-seok Lee, Jae-hyeok Cha, and In-ho Choi, was awarded a trophy and a certificate, along with gifts and tickets for the 2023 International Robocon. “We are proud that our efforts to revise the errors found during the preparation period paid off. Through Creative Engineering Design, we were able to practice applied engineering,” Su-bin Lee said. Team Threeteam received the Engineering Award for creating a robot with big wheels that could enhance productivity when performing the tasks. Team SSS received the Creativity Award for devising a stable and creative method to carry the blocks. Sang-ok Seok, representative of Naver Labs and a judge in SNU Robocon, said that he was extremely impressed by how first-year undergraduates were able to create robots of such sophistication.

Beginning in 2023, Creative Engineering Design will become a two-semester course. In Creative Engineering Design 1, students will learn about hardware and mechanical systems, while in Creative Engineering Design 2, they will deal with software and electrical engineering. Professor Cho said that for the next 30 years, his department will be committed to cultivating the seed sown by Professor Chu 30 years ago. The Department of Mechanical Engineering is also hoping to establish the SNU Robotics Lab and hold a robotics forum where scholars can connect with each other and students can receive assistance in their education in robotics.

Source: https://www.snu.ac.kr/snunow/snu_story?md=v&bbsidx=139215

Written by Seunghwan Oh, SNU English Editor, ascendhwan@snu.ac.kr
Reviewed by Professor Travis Smith, Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, tlsmith@snu.ac.kr