▲ CWNU team ‘Real Men of GyeongSang Province’ won the Grand Prize in the ‘9th Creative and Intelligent Robot Contest’. (Representative: Cheon Jun Won. Team members: Kim Seong Yeon, Jang Jun Beom, Lim Dong Hyeon, Park Kyung Su, Kang Seong Yun, and Lim Seong Min.)

Changwon National University students from the Department of Robot Control & Instrumentation Engineering won the Grand Prize Demonstration and Excellence Award at the '9th Creative and Intelligent Robot Contest' held on September 5. They won the award in the presentation category for their ‘Balancing Board’ robot.

This competition was organized by Chungnam National University and hosted by Daejun Gwangyeoksi, Daejun Marketing Corporation, and Daejun Technopark Station. The competition was held with the goal of discovering and fostering promising future engineers by promoting creativity in engineers who are the driving force behind national development.

The contest is a comprehensive competition in which 24 teams of university students from across the country apply their knowledge and creativity to a variety of robots. The contest was divided into the presentation and the demonstration sections. Due to the COVID-19, the contest was conducted over a real-time video conference using Zoom. The competition began with an opening ceremony, followed by demonstration PPT, presentations of creative robots and capstones, and finished with the presentations of the results and awards ceremonies.

The principle of the CWNU’s team ‘Balancing Board’ is to allow the wheels in the center of the board to balance themselves with the help of electrical force. They used acceleration and gyro sensors to measure the inclination of the balancing board, and PD(Proportional Derivation) Controller to improve the stability of control system without affecting the steady state error. In other words, when tilted to one side by the user, the board rolls the wheel in the tilted direction. It is a way for the board to balance itself again. The CWNU team utilized a XMC4500 microcontroller provided for free by Infineon through Industrial-Academy cooperation.

These prototypes are expected to create a new means of transportation using electricity, which has been popular in recent years in the form of electric kickboards, scooters, and segways. The big difference between the products that are currently commercialized and the balancing board is that the number of wheels is reduced from two to one, and there is a technology that allows the board to control itself.

Cheon Jun Won, a representative of the team ‘Real Men of GyeongSang Province’, said, “As it was our first online competition, I think the fact that we made thorough preparations helped us produce good results. Unlike other schools with recorded-video descriptions, we had the advantage of communicating with each other by conducting demonstrations in real time. Microprocessors subject-related learnings such as UARP and I²C, were very helpful for this contest. I hope that students from other colleges will also participate in competitions that take the theories that they learn in their studies and apply them in practice as a learning experience.”

Lee Yeon-ju, Editor-in-chief  rosielee@kakao.com

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