The robotics team from CUHK’s Faculty of Engineering claimed second place, along with the Best Design Award, at the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union’s Asia-Pacific Robot Contest (ABU Robocon), which took place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The team’s outstanding performance is a testament to CUHK’s top-level robotics and innovation education.

The CUHK robotics team was selected to represent Hong Kong in the ABU Robocon after winning the championship at the Robocon Hong Kong Contest 2023 organised by the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation in June this year. Since ABU Robocon’s inception in 2002, CUHK’s robotics team has advanced to six finals (2016, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023) of the international trophy, and in 2019 became the first Hong Kong team to win the championship, following that up with another victory in 2022.

The theme of this year’s competition was “Casting Flowers Over Angkor Wat”. Participating teams were required to design two robots to battle against their opponents by firing rings onto eight pillars in the centre of the field; the winner was the first team to have the top ring on all pillars at the same time. The CUHK team used limited space to design robots that could accurately shoot rings onto poles of different positions and heights.

Professor Tsang Hon-ki, CUHK’s Interim Dean of Engineering, said: “CUHK’s Faculty of Engineering values real-world challenges that provide students with educational experiences outside the classroom. We supported the student team by providing laboratory space and robot parts, but it is their dedication, ingenious design and hard work that achieved these excellent results. We are proud to see that the CUHK student team won the competition in Hong Kong, and were only behind the eventual international champions from Japan at ABU Robocon 2023. The results demonstrate that our students can compete at the highest levels internationally. Not winning but coming a close second can be a valuable experience, as it makes us strive to do better.”