Firefighting Robot from Indonesia Won Gold Medal at International Robo Games

Thursday, 18 June 2009

The Jakarta Globe

A fire-extinguishing robot born in a Bandung lab won a gold medal at the international Robo Games contest in San Francisco, California.

It’s the first time an Indonesian team has taken the top prize in the prestigious engineering contest, which drew thousands of students from 25 countries this year. A team from Indonesian Computer University (Unikom), dominated the Open Firefighting category with their robot, DU-114.

Robo Games featured 70 categories of competition during the three-day meet last weekend.

Rodi Hartono, the head of the two-member DU-114 team, said they won Indonesia’s regional and national competitions in 2007-08. “We have been working with the robot for a year. So, we are very happy to win the competition,” he said after arriving in Jakarta on Thursday.

Fasli Jalal, a higher education official with the Ministry of National Education, welcomed the team back from overseas.

DU-114 scored the best time in a challenge in which robots must seek out a fire — a candle flame — and douse it using an automatic water spray. “I forget our exact time. It was only seconds, and we were the best, the quickest,” the engineering student said.

Unikom sent two robots to the competition. The other machine, NEXT-116, did not place in the contest. Stevanus Akbar, the head of the NEXT-116 team, said their machine was the only one in the contest that employed eight legs to get around. Other robots, he said, used wheels or chains in their designs.

Separately, Endra Pitowarno, a robotics expert from the Electronic Engineering Polytechnic Institute of Surabaya (Eepis) said the quality of students’ designs had steadily increased over the years.

He said students should begin to focus on developing marketable products.

“Contests are the first step, but then students should take it to the next level and produce applicable things,” Endra said.