University of Lincoln researchers Tian Liu, Xuelong Sun, and Jiannan Zhao recently competed at the 2021 International Competition of Autonomous Running Robots (Running Robot). Running Robot is an international competition co-launched by Beijing Association for Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Electronics, School of Integrated Circuits, Tsinghua University, Beijing Science and Technology Association Service Center, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, etc. The competition has been successfully held for two terms, attracting more than 40 well-known universities and more than 110 teams from countries and regions, including Germany, Britain, South Korea, Pakistan, Russia and China. The competition attracted the attention of CCTV, China International TV, China Education TV, Beijing TV, Xinhua news agency, China News Agency, people’s daily, and other domestic media.

Given the pandemic situation, alongside a physical competition held in Beijing from 15-17th October 2021, there was also a virtual competition making use of the robotic simulation software, Webots. Xuelong Sun, Tian Liu and Jiannan Zhao from the University of Lincoln participated in this competition under the team name ‘LinBot’. Their excellent performance in the virtual competition secured them an impressive second place. Within only eight minutes, robots are asked to fulfill multiple tasks on the road as quickly as possible. LinBot completed all the tasks in about 7 minutes.

Xuelong said, “by solving all the challenging problems in this competition, I have learned a lot about biped robot controlling, object recognition, computer vision etc. And importantly how to cooperate with others in a team. Thanks for the support and help from the ULTRACEPT project and all the colleagues in the university.”