Gan Jack En (first row, extreme right) and Chia Qin Feng (first row, 2nd from right), two of the four TAR UC team members who were present, holding up their bronze medals together with other prize winners and officials of the competition.
Four TAR UC students of the Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) Electrical and Electronics won the Bronze medal at the 4th National Advanced Robotics Challenge (‘NARC’) 2018 held on 8 September 2018. The students namely Foo Kheng Hong, Han Li Shan, Gan Jack En and Chia Qin Feng, participated in the competition and competed against 11 teams from 7 education institutions to win the Bronze medal.
The challenge was to make a robot that could score as many points as possible in a robot version of the Tetris® game called Tetrastack. The robot developed had to locate, identify and stack interlocking coloured shapes called tetracubes within the Stacking Form – a rectangular upright box.
On what motivated them in achieving this win, the team said: “It would definitely be our parents, friends and lecturers who have been very supportive of our work. We believe we should do our best in the competition so that they will not be disappointed. Moreover, we find that working hard in these industry competitions will expand our knowledge of the practical aspect of engineering.”
Foo Kheng Hong was quick to mention that TAR UC had provided them with all the necessities to win in the competition. “The extensive amount of programming courses in the Faculty of Engineering and Technology (‘FOET’) has strengthened our foundation for this competition. The programming languages we have learned include MPLAB, C++, LabView, and MATLAB and this has allowed us to think quickly and solve programming problems and get our robot to work as intended. Moreover, our lecturer, Dr Raymond Wong Jee Keen, has contributed to our success by sharing his knowledge and giving us advice that increased our chances of winning the competition tremendously. He also handled all the background procedures so that our attention was focused on preparing for the competition itself. Lastly, TAR UC also allocated a budget for us to spend in the competition so that we would not have to worry about financial resources.”
Gan Jack En added that they faced challenges during the competition which they had to overcome. “The challenge was to find the right balance between doing our course assignments and preparing for the external competition. We overcame the problem by putting the competition aside temporarily to focus our attention solely on our coursework first. After all the coursework were submitted, we were then able to focus on preparing our robot, just two weeks shy of the competition,” he said.
Han Li Shan and Chia Qin Feng have the one advice they would like to give to juniors who are keen on participating in such competition. “Students should get themselves to work in a pressured environment that involves some decision making and not focus solely on the theories in their books. This will help them to be more practical and realistic when providing opinions and solutions for real life problems,” they remarked.
