The 9th open robotic tournament CyberDubna-2020 took place in Dubna from 14 to 16 February 2020. The tournament gathered 30 teams from Dmitrov, Dolgoprudny, Dubna, Eldigino, Likino-Dulevo, Moscow, Protvino, Pushkino, St. Petersburg and the village Pravdinsky (Pushkiny district). Almost 80 school children of 7 – 11 grades and first-year students of secondary education institutes competed in the tournament. Organizers of the event were the JINR University Centre, the MIPT Club of Sports Robotic Technology, the Interregional Computer School (Dubna), the IT Centre “Citadel” (Yakhroma). Participants of the tournament spent two and a half days from morning till late evening (with only lunch and dinner breaks) studying first and then working on projects. They took part in so-called “quanta” of the tournament, the robot show. Junior participants attended workshops on the basics of robotic technology.

Chairman of the organizing committee Petr Dmitrievich Shirkov commented on the peculiarities of the tournament on its final day:

“The geography of the tournament has expanded a little: this year, we have welcomed students from St. Petersburg. But in general, fewer children take part in the event as far as we used to hold it in the small concert hall of the Cultural Centre “Mir” and it was closed for repairs this year. There was a lot of applications for the competition, much more than we had in previous years. We managed to approve only 40 per cent of them.

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The key changes in the programme: this year, there is no Lego, and most likely it won’t be used any more. The second significant change is that we have completely excluded competitions on pre-announced topics. It is the fourth year we have been holding the competition “Robot for life” among reduced and simplified copies of devices that help in every-day life. These competitions were held on Saturday; 22 teams of three age groups took part in them. The youngest ones were 4-6 grade and 7-9 grade students. They were supposed to assemble the “wire-free gramophone”. The gramophone was modelled very simply: it was a disk with black and white segments, and the sensor was supposed to play a certain note when caught a black segment. Seven notes and a pause were encoded using three discharges. Their older colleagues created a smart crane: it lifts a particular mass, and if its power is not enough and there may be an overcurrent, it is supposed to stop operation having determined the maximum load it can withstand.

As far as the Biathlon World Championships started, we invented a robobiathlon on-the-go. The task is the following. There is a track the robot follows in autonomous mode. The places of shooting range are marked on the track. The robot should determine that it has reached the shooting range using a special marker, turn on the Bluetooth channel, and the operator takes up control. He brings the robot to balls and places it so that to hit the target with a ball. Then the operator directs the robot to the track, Bluetooth is turned off, and the robot goes to the next target autonomously.

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Moreover, we started discussing tasks for the future closed three-day seminar with Bauman University that had by that way an agreement with the University “Dubna” and JINR (major organizer of the tournament) on the engineering and technical education. As far as next year the 60th anniversary of the flight of Yu. A. Gagarin will be celebrated, it will be connected with work of the robot at the ISS.

Simultaneously with the final preparation of “biathlon players” we held today two workshops: one of them was for junior participants from primary schools who created an “intellectual” tunnel. It sent signals that it was busy when a car drove into it. Senior participants created a “smart safe”. We organized the first tournament in Dmitrov in 2012 when I headed the Dmitrov branch of the University “Dubna” and then it moved to Dubna. JINR supported the tournament. So, now it is a planned JINR event. We have grown so much that received invitations from some educational institutions of Dmitrov to hold the second stage of the event for schoolchildren from Dmitrov, Yakhroma, neighbouring districts who have not managed to be selected for the Dubna stage. If our leaders support us, we will make the tournament two-stage: we will organize preliminary rounds in some places of the Moscow Region, and their winners will get invitations to the final stage in Dubna that will be held in the frames of the 10th jubilee tournament CyberDubna-2021.

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Based on the article by Olga Tarantina, JINR Weekly Newspaper
Photos by Elena Puzynina