From May 10 through May 12, a 48-hour hackathon “RoboBattle 48” took place, where the TSI was represented by the team “Borya Chicorya”, consisting of TSI students – Richards Aizpurietis, Ilja Jezkovs, Rolands Lipskis, Timofejs Oniscuks, Arina Cizevska and Darja Prihodko. During the 48-hour hackathon, “Borya Chicorya” worked on their robot “Banana Wheelchair,” which received the award for “The Most Beautiful Robot” from the organizers at the end of the tournament.
On the first day, when it was time to present our idea to the audience, we had neither an idea nor a presentation. At that moment, I had a banana in my hand. So, as I stepped onto the stage, I started presenting the “banana idea” – a combat robot with a banana as the passenger. Our main goal was to protect the banana. Therefore, we created a fast, agile robot and during the fights, we mainly avoided the opponent and waited for it to make a mistake and fall into one of the arena traps.
Richards Aizpurietis, a 2nd-year TSI bachelor’s student in Robotics and participant of the hackathon, shared what happened behind the scenes of the hackathon
The hackathon was divided into seven separate stages, during which teams developed their robots. At the end of the robot development stage, “RoboBattle 48” consisted of two separate competitions. In one of them, the team had three minutes to present their creation, while the second part of the competition was dedicated to a robot tournament, in which all suitable robots participated. Participants were randomly assigned to their respective tournament groups to then compete in the arena, to find out which robot was the strongest and most durable.
