Department of Information and Tourism, Taipei City Government

Taiwanese students again demonstrated to the international community their might. This time is with 8 dancing “Cats” and soccer robots capable of defence and offence! On January 25th, Tzong-huu Kang, Commissioner of Department of Education in Taipei City Government, met the award winning students of “RoboCup Junior 2009” and complimented them for the great achievement at such a young age.
The Robot Cup Junior(RCJ) was held in Graz, Austria from July 1st to 5th, 2009 and there were over 2,300 participants from 44 countries and the event was divided in three parts: dancing robot, robot soccer, rescue, service robot. After the interviews, preliminaries and keen finals, 9 students from Taipei City were awarded. Among them, Zhihin Lin from Datong Junior High School, Shangyun Han from Renai Junior High School, and Xiecheng Zhang from Taipei Fu Hsing Private School defeated more than 30 teams from all over the world and won the Special Award in secondary division. Shangyun Han stated that his team spent three months to make eight robot cats which dance with the music from the famous Broadway show, “Cat”. The robot cats were mainly controlled by sound and equipped with compass, light sensors and LEDs. The most challenge part was to continuously modify the program to control 3 sets of motors and gears and thus the head, limbs and tail of each robot would move in accord with the rhythm of music. In order to solve the styrofoam head loosening problem caused frequent rotation, he reinforced the heads and necks of robot cats with plastic steel.
In addition, Yutang Guo from Long Men Junior High School, and Zhongjin Guo from Ren-Ai Elementary School are brothers who received 2nd place in soccer competition secondary division. Their robots had four wheels and capable of moving in eight directions agilely. The most memorable match of theirs was one of finals with Spanish team, in which the battery of the brothers’ robot had a malfunction and they fixed it calmly and promptly, and then won with 2:1 at the end. On the other hand, Junhan Ye from Taipei Private Tsai Hsing High School won 3rd place in soccer competition 14 year old division and best secondary team. He said that he made two types of robots: defensive and offensive, but because he did not measure the light in advance before the match with Portugal team, the robots were less light sensitive and thus failed to defend.
Tzong-huu Kang expressed that the young participants are future inventors as they can assemble and design cold machine robots function as humans with creativity and imagination. He encouraged students to continue in research and studying with passion and persistence and show Taiwanese students’ creativities to the world.