Me & My Robot

(bright music) Yes. Uh, no. (speaking Japanese) No. Ah, no.

No, no, no. (speaking Japanese) Well, I think everybody in this type of competition is a little bit of a nerd. I'm not a nerd. Um, yeah, I think I'm a nerd.

No. No, um, a nerd is just working very hard on something, and, yeah, in this kind of definition I am a nerd. Hmm, yeah, I'm a nerd. A pretty weird nerd, but I like it.

I am a nerd. A nerd for robotics, yes. (bright music) -

Woman

Xenia, it's half past seven. Get up please, get up! Hi! Oh, the skyline is marvelous.

-

Interviewer

What makes you good at your role? -

Brian

Oh, um, we've just being doing this for a long time now, so. We have experience. -

Jason

Experience. (upbeat music) -

Haruhi

Ouch, oh my God! It's my cheek, not takoyaki! Hello, my name is Haruhi Iwata. My team is Otemon Challenger from Japan!

This is takoyaki, this is real takoyaki, not my cheek. So let's eating! Okay, got my two babies. This one is just really hyper at all times.

This one isn't hyper but... -

Together

He eats everything. Right here, the cat has started to gnaw on some of the cords. Yeah, we were growing some lettuce for this to test out and he ended up eating it once it got bigger than two inches. Someone asked me if I wanted a robot lawnmower.

For sure, I would like to have one. It's a pretty long job. I have a electric lawnmower. The job is not too tough but...

You can do a lot of things in 40 minutes. You can do robotics, guitar and badminton. By the way, my father has a robot lawnmower. The problem is that he calls it Michael and it's me.

So this is my bed. Piano, my guitar. I like roofing and photography. Roofing because it is really beautiful.

Especially in St. Petersburg. And you can see the straight horizon line with spires and domes. You can see amazing landscapes and sunrises, sunsets.

And photography very interesting for me because you can create anything with photography and it is really interesting to shoot nature and to shoot people especially. (bright music) Oh! That was not preferable. I think coming up with an idea for solving world hunger is definitely more important than just winning WRO.

Like, this year the topic is Food Matters. Teams will work on things like ending world hunger within their robotics and that is an amazing thing to do. So, our robot solves all of the four goals. So, which is the ending hunger, promote sustainable agriculture, adds food nutrition and food security.

(speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) According to the United Nations, Spirulina was one of the best future food. The robot can plant, can harvest Spirulina autonomously without human involving. We have a submersible hydroponic farm. -

Brian

It detects ripe and unripe strawberries and it can harvest them. Our robot is an automated aquaponics farm. We are farming both the plants and the fish. (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) We have only two weeks left to finish our final product.

So I feel a little bit worried that we won't finish it on time. Honestly, my project is not yet done. It is not perfectly ready to go and compete in any competition. I think it's gonna be a great experience.

I'm probably going to have to fight through a lot of jet lag. So, our robot is now done. But currently something is broken. It got shorted, so I am fixing it.

We're kind of really pressured because we haven't even practiced our presentation yet. We just finished building our robot and preparing it for the competition in less than two weeks in Thailand. We hope that we will do our best there and we'll see if we can win something and that's all. (laughing) See you in Thailand!

(happy music) We're actually inside the Detroit Metro Airport now, passed the security. We're in the Barcelona Airport. We are waiting for the plane. We are going to Chiang Mai.

(happy music) (upbeat music) So, now we are in Chiang Mai. We are in Bangkok right now. We are now in the royal palace, as you can see. We have had to buy this typical pants because we have to wear long...

Pants. Yes. - Long pants. It's really hot here.

In addition we have jet lag, so it's kinda hard to know what the time right now. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) The robot has to collect this food and bring the containers to the factories. We have here a sensor that can look at the blocks, the stripe blocks. This right here is an arm using a worm gear and it's used to pick up the pieces of food.

These are the plants. We have green, yellow and red. You drop the plants and you place them in the fertile soils. So I'm from Syria, from North Syria, from a city that's called Idlib.

The main war is there. My family has fled from the city, went to Germany. He had a picture of us and he came there and said, "I want to find this persons." It's not important if he's from Syria or from Germany or from somewhere else in the world. If he likes my hobbies, everything is cool.

When you have a passion towards robotics then you are going to be successful in this field. We're competing in the open categories, so we're given a broad topic and we basically have to come up with a robot that fits the theme. It's our first year in the senior category. Some of our competition's actually in college and has college funding for it and we don't, we're kind of working out of our basement, so once we got here, we saw that there's a lot of really neat stuff going on and we're not truly sure about our chances.

I mean, no we're not coming in last. But we're not likely to get first or anywhere in top three I believe. I am the team captain, which is really cool 'cause I'm the youngest. I am the one programming our robot.

Actually this is the biggest mistake. I guess 10 hours before the flight I accidentally cut my finger when we were packing our boxes I have this cutter and shing. It actually have five stitches, but still my determination and the excitement for this competition surpasses all the pain. (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (happy music) Our robot is like a teenager, because one day it's working normally, but the next day he becomes a rebel, he doesn't want to work.

I'm really interested in robotics because robotics can be in medicine, in space, in industrial robotics. You can do whatever you want. (piano plays) (piano plays) (piano plays) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) You need to figure out a way to solve problems and structure. (speaking Russian) (speaking Russian) (speaking Russian) (speaking Russian) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) Robotics is the combination of both creativity and engineering to create an even greater result.

In this competition you don't have any rule except size of the robot but you can do whatever you want, and well, we've seen today that there are robots that are very different. Creativity's just creating robot in your own way. My programming teacher once said that when coding stops to involve your creativity in the process, you should quit this programming job. -

Vasiliy

Dimitrii is a really good teammate, 'cause he's a very good programmer. Almost half of a year ago when we started to work on this project, he didn't work in robotics and now he's in World Robot Olympiad. There's a very high level here, so we'll see how we do tomorrow but let's hope we do well. (speaking Thai) (speaking Thai) (speaking Thai) (speaking Thai) Girls don't need to think that they're any less than guys.

Girls might start robotics or start coding and programming and science at a young age but they end up realizing that society might not accept them and they start dropping out of these programs and that's why it's so important for girls to stay involved in all the STEM and science clubs. (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) In our team, we are more girls than boys, so I don't think that's a problem. (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) I think we can be ambassadors because we are an all-girl team. That we can show that girls can also rock robotics.

(groovy music) Surprise rule. One per team. Please, you cannot discuss this with your coaches, with your parents, with anybody outside. Keep this...

Matching the black soil. Per fertilizing blue plant- I think we are pretty okay for any sort of surprise rule to change a program or to change a robot. We could get a good placement if we get the surprise rule right. (upbeat music) (speaking German) (speaking French) Less than a minute and 30 seconds!

Make sure you bring your robot on time on the table! Late submissions will not be accepted! (upbeat music) Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one! This one is late.

This is late. (upbeat music) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) Science is really important because it shows us how world really works. It also helps with communicating with others on complex problems. It provides you with logical reasoning.

Without it, you kind of remain ignorant and I honestly have always just wanted to learn as much about the world as I possible could. Okay. Oh okay, I'm sorry. (upbeat music) Let's talk about our robot.

Most of the time, it fails. Two, one, go! The first run, our robot didn't work that well. We have experienced some problems.

We were testing our our submersible vehicle and we started getting some errors in that. Even the parts that always worked, didn't work. -

Vasiliy

If you have the best robot in the world, if you can't present it, you won't win. A lot of people say that the best way to learn is by failing. I understand it because if you fail, you will know your errors and you won't do it again. Ready?

- Yeah. Three, two, one, go! 25... 15...

Thank you. My teammate and I, if we did our best and there's nothing to regret about anymore then that is the biggest, most important success for us, for me. Nice. - So, you can sign it.

Oh, I'll sign it. Using our robot. Our robot. We will spread our idea around the world.

I hope that we have chances to win, because there will be a final round tomorrow. (calming music) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Chinese) (speaking Chinese) (speaking Chinese) (speaking Chinese) My dad doesn't like my idea on this one. As robotics is gonna take away more and more jobs, as we all know it will, you're gonna run into a point where either you stop doing robotics and stop using all the benefits that it has or you just completely switch everything over and basically put everyone on a guaranteed income. I'm feeling confident because I know that even though I won't win, I will have a nice experience and I will still be winning because being here in Thailand, already it's something positive and good.

The robot didn't got the black line so it's over, game over, but it was a great participation. We have learned a lot. I'm learning right now from other teams. I'm asking all other teams what have they done because this is my last participation so it was a great year.

It didn't go well. And still I learned a lot of things. As a leader I think I will give more detailed advice to teammates using their good points. (speaking Russian) (speaking Russian) (speaking Russian) (speaking Russian) (speaking Russian) So, WRO is not only about robots, it's also about the show.

So if you can entertain the people around you, if you can show that you like your project. -

Together

Let your food always be on the top. And I couldn't be more thrilled to have spent the last three days with all of you, because you are truly the future innovators that will be solving the world's toughest challenges going forward. So, ladies and gentlemen, this is the time that we will know who's gonna win after all the hard work that we have done. First, the second, the third place will be on a stage to receive their award.

Are we ready? Are we ready? (crowd cheers) Yes! The third place, I would like to have you on the stage to receive the award for the Open Category Senior.

The third place goes to... Pi-Rho Technics from USA! And the second place of Senior Category goes to... Schollibotics from Germany!

And the first place, the winner, goes to... Strawberry Fields from Russia! (upbeat music) I thought that was the coolest thing ever to be able to control LEGO or anything you create being able to control it and make it move around. When you build a robot and you put them into the field, you see what you have done and you feel that you have worked well and that what you do really, it has an application.

Robotics is an amazing way to learn new skills. My self confidence was this, but when I joined the robotics team that teached me how to talk to people. (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) I think doing robot is way fun than going to school and taking lessons. The teacher's writing the blackboard and we're just copying those things.

That's not even knowledge! (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) (speaking Russian) (speaking Russian) (speaking Russian) (speaking Russian) I just want to do something that helps the society and make it better. Even though that we are young, I want my voice and our voices to be heard. We want them to know that we can help.

This is the main thing of robotics I believe. To save the planet. (calming music) It's my first time on WRO and we won the first place. We thought we will get ninth of fourth, but...

Eventually it happened. I think I will develop more this project. And you, Alexander? I have many ideas in my head right now and I think I'm going to create it in real life.

(calming music) Raul, see! I found a new lawnmower. A buffalo. He's eating a lot of grass.