News from Krcmar Lab

TUM Robotics Competition 2021

News I17, News Krcmar Lab |

The Technical University of Munich (TUM) traditionally hosts a robotics competition for students aged 11 to 15. Last year, the competition unfortunately had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. The 18th repetition of the competition was again organized by students as part of an internship at the Department of Information Systems at the Faculty of Computer Science by students led by Dr. Robert Heininger and Prof. Dr. Helmut Krcmar.


In view of the ongoing pandemic, the competition could not take place as usual on site at TUM in Garching. In order not to miss the 2021 competition, the team of the internship decided to offer a virtual competition on the platform OpenRoberta (https://lab.open-roberta.org/) provided by the Fraunhofer Institute. In this context, four weekly worksheets were published in the weeks after the Easter vacations, which had to be mastered in teams of 2 to 4 students. 

On Saturday, May 15, the grand finale took place as a final event online via the BigBlueButton platform. Here, 37 children divided into 14 teams competed against each other and had to master a course with their robots. The course was based on the worksheets from the previous weeks. In addition, however, other small surprise obstacles had to be overcome. The teams were able to participate in two different levels of difficulty and to tackle either the "expert" or the "novice" course. 

In the end, the "Rock n Robots" team from the Luipold-Gymnasium in Munich prevailed in the "Novices" type of course and won first place, followed by a team from the Katharinen-Gymnasium in Ingolstadt and the Käthe-Kollowitz-Gymnasium in Munich. The winners received Conrad vouchers worth €100, €75 and €50 per team member. In the "Experts" type of course, the team from the MINT-Campus Dachau beat the other teams by a clear margin, followed by a team from the Anne-Frank-Gymnasium Erding and a team from the Reuchlin-Gymnasium Ingolstadt. The winners received a Conrad voucher worth 150€, 125€ and 100€ per team member.

Many thanks to our generous sponsors and donors TÜV Süd Stiftung, doubleSlash, eXXcellent solutions and Maiborn Wolff, who made the generous prizes for the competition possible. 
We are already looking forward to next year's competition and hope that it can take place in presence again then.