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Competition · Champion

Cybernauts 2016

Organized by NSU Computer and Engineering Club, North South University, 28 October 2016

Group photo with teammates, fellow participants and the organisers after winning the Cybernauts 2016 championship at North South University

Cybernauts 2016 was one of the largest national technology festivals in Bangladesh, held at North South University (NSU), Dhaka, from 28 to 31 October 2016. Organised by the NSU Computer and Engineering Club, it featured four inter-university contests: a National Programming Contest, a Line Follower Robot Contest, an Engineering Project Showcase and Cyber Athletics.

Our team, DUET Robo Express, competed in the Line Follower Robot Contest on 28 October against more than 90 teams from universities across the country, including BUET, Dhaka University, RUET and SUST. Each robot had to follow a black line autonomously through a maze-like track with bridges and sharp turns, without leaving the line. The contest ran in three rounds: eight teams advanced to the semi-finals, and four reached the final.

I led the team as Team Leader, alongside Emran Hossain (EEE) and Ananda Kumar Saha (ME). We spent about two months building our robot: a compact 20 × 20 × 20 cm chassis with two rear drive wheels and a front ball caster. Its key strength was its decision-making. Rather than reacting to a single sensor reading, it sampled its inputs repeatedly and confirmed each reading before choosing a direction, which made it highly reliable on complex tracks.

The second round brought an unexpected challenge, when the organisers suddenly swapped the start and finish points of the track. With no time for test runs, we reprogrammed the robot on the spot and competed without any fresh tuning.

DUET Robo Express finished first in all three rounds. In the final, our robot completed the full track in just 57 seconds without a single restart, winning the championship ahead of Team Uncertain from the Military Institute of Science and Technology (MIST). The championship prize was Tk 25,000 and a Tk 3,000 TechShop gift voucher, presented at a closing ceremony attended by senior NSU leadership. The result was later covered by the Daily Kaler Kantha.

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In the press

Daily Kaler Kantha · 21 December 2016

সাইবারনটের সেরা

The Best of Cybernauts

By Mahbubur Rahman Sumon

In brief

On 21 December 2016, the Daily Kaler Kantha published a feature on Cybernauts 2016, one of the country's largest inter-university technology competitions, organised by the North South University Computer and Engineering Club from 28 to 31 October 2016. The event had four segments: a Line Follower Robot Contest, a programming contest, an engineering project showcase and a cyber athletics contest. The article opens its coverage with our team, DUET Robo Express, champions of the Line Follower Robot Contest. Ninety-five teams competed, including teams from the University of Dhaka, North South University, BRAC University and MIST. Only eight reached the semi-final and four the final, where our robot completed the course, with its sharp turns and a small bridge, in just 57 seconds. It was the best-performing robot in all three rounds, ahead of the runner-up team from MIST, and won us the championship and Tk 25,000. The feature introduces our team members: Emran Hossain and me from the Department of EEE, and Ananda Kumar Saha from Mechanical Engineering, all final-year students at the time, who met through the DUET Robotics Club. It describes how we built the robot over two months, with a design that reads the track in real time instead of following a pre-programmed route, and lists our earlier results: 2nd Runner-up at the RUET RoboTour and Programming Contest and at Mecceleration 2015, then 1st Runner-up at Robo-Droid 2016, 2nd Runner-up at the Global Robotics Challenge 2016 Bangladesh round and Champion at ROBOLUTION 2016.