2 Gold Sponsor
Bronze Sponsors
Other Sponsor
In Association with
3 MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR, IIT DELHI
Prof. V. Ramgopal Rao
It is our honour to be able to host the prestigious DD-ROBOCON competition at IIT Delhi campus on June 16, 2019 (Sunday). I understand that the competition is being held for the first time in Delhi since its inception in 2002. IIT Delhi team thanks Doordarshan for their confidence in us. As I understand, our organizing team, along with a committee of Judges and Referees drawn from various colleges/institutes of the country, selected 26 teams from 86 submissions as Solution Ideas in Stage 1. These teams will bring their robots to IIT Delhi to compete with others, and the winning team will represent the country in Ulan Bator, Mongolia for the ABU-ROBOCON Competition on August 25, 2019.
Knowing that the teams have to make one of the two robots which should walk on four legs to cross difficult terrains and climb a slope (depicting a mountain), it appears to be a very challenging task. However, such experiences of designing, fabrication, and control will make our engineering graduates really close to what India needs today, i.e., Creativity, Innovation and Product building.
I want to take this opportunity to welcome all 650+ participants and other dignitaries to the beautiful IIT Delhi campus. IIT Delhi has recently been designated as an Institution of Eminence by Govt. of India, one of the only three government institutions which has been bestowed this status. IIT Delhi has a strong research culture in the robotics field and many of the faculty members and research scholars involved in the robotics area will be involved in the organization of this event. I am sure there will be fruitful interactions between participants and the IIT Delhi team.
Finally, I sincerely thank our students, staff, and faculty for making DD-ROBOCON 2019 a reality, and I wish them all the best for the event.
Prof. V. Ramgopal Rao Director , IIT Delhi 24th May, 2019
1 MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR GENERAL, DOORDARSHAN
Smt. Supriya Sahu, IAS
Doordarshan, as a Public Service Broadcaster, has always taken the lead in promoting and encouraging innovations and use of technology in every aspect of life. Towards this Doordarshan is partnering with IIT Delhi to promote Doordarshan-ABU ROBOCON event to be held on June 16, 2019 at IIT Delhi. It is heartening to note that 86 teams participated in the preliminary rounds from various colleges from across the country including IITs and NITs. 26 teams have finally been selected to showcase their innovations for the event to be held on June16, 2019. The winning team will have an opportunity to participate in the final ABU ROBOCON event to be held at Ulan Bator, Mongolia on 25th August, 2019. Undoubtedly, DD-ABU ROBOCON event presents a fabulous opportunity to students to showcase their skills. It also provides an excellent opportunity to students towards team building and learning from each other.
I take this opportunity to congratulate and thank IIT Delhi for their collaboration with Doordarshan towards this path breaking initiative. I would like to thank the Students, Staff and Faculty, Judges and Referees as well as Team DD, which has worked tirelessly towards successfully organization of this event.
Supriya Sahu Director General, Doordarshan 24th May, 2019
2 MESSAGE FROM ABU-ROBOCON SECRETARIAT
On behalf of ABU-ROBOCON Tokyo Secretariat, it is my pleasure to see DD-ROBOCON 2019 will be held at IIT Delhi which is one of the famous engineering schools in the World.
I have been told that 86 teams submitted their Solution Idea proposals. From those, 54 teams were shortlisted by a committee formed with the professors from various colleges/institutes of India. Finally, 26 teams were called to bring their robots at IIT Delhi on June 16, 2019 based on the video submissions. I congratulate all 86 teams for their participation, and wish all the best to 26 teams for their games at IIT Delhi.
Even though I am not personally present in India, I have been closely following up with the organizers, particularly, Doordarshan and Prof. S.K. Saha at IIT Delhi whom I know since 2006-07 when India was preparing to host 2008 ABU-ROBOCON in Pune, and later in 2007 while IIT Delhi was participating in ABU-ROBOCON in Hanoi, Vietnam.
I am looking forward to welcoming the Indian representative team in Ulaalbaatar, Mongolia on August 25, 2019!
Megumi Iizuka-Lamb
ABU-ROBOCON Tokyo Secretariat May 27, 2019
3 MESSAGE FROM THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Other Team Members
Volunteers for DD-ROBOCON S. K. Saha Sunil Jha Rama Krishna K 2019
It is little emotional to write this message as we have been hearing about ROBOCON 2019 to be held at New Delhi since last year. Several official procedures had to be followed at Doordarshan and IIT Delhi before it has been finally decided in December 2018 to host the competition by IIT Delhi. One of us was involved with this competition since 2002 when IIT Delhi was asked by the Director of IIT Kanpur to organize the competition in Delhi to select a team from India to participate in Asian Broadcasting Union (ABU) ROBOCON to be held in Tokyo, Japan. It was unfortunate that we missed the opportunity to be the first host of the competition. It was held at IIT Kanpur in 2002. Nirma Institute of Technology (NIT) in Ahmedabad being the first champion of the event in Kanpur was very kind to host the event next two years in Ahmedabad. The following 14 years were conducted by Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MIT) group in Pune. They are to be congratulated to host even two international ABU-ROBOCON in 2008 and 2014. ROBOCON in India has seen the growth from mere three teams in 2002 to more than 100 teams in last few years in Pune. It has shown significant growth but we would like to have even more teams participating in India for such technology-rich competition where the game plan is decided by a set of experts drawn from professors of reputed university/institute of the host country of ABU ROBOCON, national broadcaster, and few international experts from Japan and elsewhere. It takes about a year to formulate the game theme, make drawings of the game field and game items, make test field and game items by keeping in mind that those would be reproducible in the participating countries. On the day of ABU-ROBOCON of the previous year the game plan for the next year is disclosed. For example, the game plan of 2020 ABU-ROBOCON will be disclosed on August 25, 2019 at Ulan Bator, Mongolia (the host of this year's ABU ROBOCON).
In order to strengthen DD-ROBOCON in India, we have changed the format this year by keeping the similarity with the style of international event, i.e., to conduct the games in one day. Since making these robots costs quite high we allowed more and more teams to participate in Stage 1 by providing only "Solution Ideas (Proposal)". To check their preparedness we asked them to submit videos of critical operations as a part of Stage2. Finally, we selected 26 teams based on the performances of 54 videos in Stage 2 which were again based on 86 Solution Ideas in Stage 1. We would like to congratulate all 86 teams for their participation in DD-ROBOCON 2019. Even if all 86 could not come to IIT Delhi, let them be with us over live telecast planned by Doordarshan on June 16, 2019.
4 We also request them to keep their tempo up and proceed with the fabrication and operation of the robots for their research and laboratory experiment purposes in their colleges/institutes. They may become a REAL product one day! The competition day of DD- ROBOCON 2019 at IIT Delhi was changed from traditional March in Pune to June mainly due to 1) Availability of the hostels at IIT Delhi, and more importantly 2) providing less time to the champion team to change their robots before they ship to Mongolia. Such changes in the robot after the national championship caused more harm to many winning teams earlier (at least to IIT Delhi who was the national champion in 2007 to represent India in Hanoi, Vietnam) as they do not get any more opportunity to test the performance of the modified robots by competing with other teams. We hope the winning team at least should be able to repeat the performance of their national winning game. We are really sorry for the change in date which caused inconveniences to many colleges/institutes in the country but we hope it will pay off in future.
Now, it is the time to acknowledge the enormous support we received from Doordarshan including Ms. Supriya Sahu, IAS who is the DG-Doordarshan, Mr. Sunil, Mr. Sri Ram, Mr. Sandeep Sood, and others. At IIT Delhi, we first thank our Director, Prof. V. Ramgopal Rao, for immediately agreeing to host the event in New Delhi in collaboration with Doordarshan. Our thanks are also due to Prof. M. Balakrishnan, Deputy Director (S&P), Prof. B.R. Mehta, Dean (R&D), Prof. Rajesh Khanna, Dean (SA), Prof. A.K. Nema, Associate Dean of SA (BHM), Prof. Joby Joseph, Associate Dean of Academics (UG), Prof. G.V. Prakash (Prof. in-charge of LHC), and many staff, students, and faculty across the institute whose list may be endless.
The kind agreement of The Robotics Society in India to be associated with DD-ROBOCON 2019 is a new beginning, which we hope to continue in future as well. The help extended by Prof. Yogesh Bhalerao from MIT and his team to understand some of the critical aspects of hosting such event is sincerely acknowledged. Getting funds to support our research and academic conferences is a routine activity but obtaining financial support for DD-ROBOCON 2019 was indeed a challenging task. We are extremely thankful to all our sponsors MathWorks, SERB, P&F, BIS, Rohm, Kuka, Springer for their generous financial grants or prizes. Finally, we thank the committee of Judges and Referees consisting of Prof. P.M. Pathak of IIT Roorkee, Prof. Anant M. Chakradeo of MIT Institute of Design, Prof. S.S. Ohol of COEP, Pune, and the most popular Chief Referee among the students Prof. T.P. Singh of PDP Univ., Ahmedabad for their time during several virtual and physical meetings to shortlist teams in Stages 1 and 2. The comments from two special invitees, Prof. Chetan Arora and Prof. Shubhendu Bhasin from our CSE and EE Depts. of IIT Delhi, respectively, during Stage 1, are also acknowledged. At the end, let us have a great DD-ROBOCON 2019 at IIT Delhi, and excuse us for any difficult situation or inconvenience faced by anybody before and/or during the DD-ROBOCON 2019 competition.
Organizing Committee
5 HISTORY OF ABU ROBOCON The ABU Asia-Pacific Robot Contest was founded in 2002 by Asian-Pacific Broadcasting Union, where teams of undergraduate students build robots which compete to finish a set of tasks. The aim of this contest was to increase interest of young people to work together to solve problems, and advance the engineering and broadcasting technologies of the region.
ROBOCONs like this were started in Japan by NHK in 1991, where colleges of Japan competed against each other.
Each year, the competition has a different topic, and is usually chosen in accordance with a tradition or custom of the host country. The list of ABU ROBOCONS is below.
Sl No. Year Host city Theme
1 2002 Tokyo, Japan Reach for the Top of Mt. Fuji 2 2003 Bangkok, Thailand Takraw Space Conqueror 3 2004 Seoul, Korea Reunion of Separated Lovers, Gyeonwoo & Jiknyeo 4 2005 Beijing, China Climb on the Great Wall Light the Holy Fire
5 2006 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Building the World’s Tallest Twin Tower
6 2007 Hanoi, Vietnam Halong Bay Discovery 7 2008 Pune, India Govinda
8 2009 Tokyo, Japan Travel Together for the Victory Drums
9 2010 Cairo, Egypt Robo-Pharaohs built pyramids
10 2011 Bangkok, Thailand Loy Krathong, Lighting Happiness with friendship
11 2012 Hong Kong Peng On Dai Gat (In pursuit of peace and prosperity)
12 2013 Da Nang, Vietnam The Green Planet
13 2014 Pune, India A Salute for Parenthood
14 2015 Yogyakarta, Indonesia Robominton
15 2016 Bangkok, Thailand Clean Energy Recharging the World
16 2017 Tokyo, Japan The Landing Disc “NÉM CÒN” The Festival Wishing Happiness & 17 2018 Ninh Binh, Vietnam Prosperity 18 2019 Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia GREAT URTUU: Sharing the knowledge
6 ‘GREAT URTUU’: SHARING THE KNOWLEDGE
The on ept ehind B C N is to retra e the routes o ‘The rtuu’ an an ient essenger s ste innovated No adi Mongols This s ste as one o the ost unda ental tools o anaging the Mongolian pire rela ing in or ation ilitar intelligen e trade and tri ute upto in a single da a ross the Mongolian teppe urasian lainlands
This ear s slogan sharing the no ledge is in line ith the prin iples o “Great rtuu”, hi h e plo ed essengers travelling atop horses et een rela stations around apart hile hanging horses at these stations to aintain pa e and providing resting ti e or horses These rela stations ere alled ‘ rtuu’, hen e the system’s na e