Introducing NADCup robotics competitions

NADco’s robotic tournament, called NADcup, is exclusively designed for pre-college students. However, NADcup is not only about competition, but it is mostly designed to encourage all the participants to involve in a scientific and technical team-work as well as enjoying the interaction with their peer students. To illustrate the scale of the event, it is useful to know that in the latest NADcup more than 1500 students in form of 640 teams from 25 cities were participating. 

Most of the games are designed for a specific robot kit produced by NADco. Games are meticulously designed to accommodate learning while having loads of fun. The tournament is held on a yearly basis in major cities of Iran, and is supported by some state departments such as National Student’s Organization.
In NADCup, records of all the students can be traced, and may be compared to the last year’s record of the same participant. They are rewarded for the progress they have made, regardless of being at the top.
In the following, we provide a brief description about each of the competitions held in a NADCup

.

Warrior Robots

In this competition, warrior robots should push the opponent out of the designated area or break it down in a way that it cannot function anymore. The area is a 1.5m diameter circle that is partially surrounded by 20cm high walls. It is held in three classes: lightweight, heavyweight, and free-weight. Using almost any weapon or tool is permitted unless it is dangerous for the audience. This competition is highly popular as it has lots of room for bringing in new ideas due to its minimal level of restrictions.

Robots’ Manual Soccer

This competition teaches designing mechanical mechanisms to students. The task is to guide and shoot a golf ball to the opponent’s goal while at least two-third of the ball is not being covered with the robot’s body. This game is induced from the International RoboCup soccer tournament, but it is adapted to skill and knowledge level of a junior high student.

Maze-solver Robots

Robots should pass through a labyrinth as fast as possible while precisely counting the black lines they pass over on the floor. The competition is effectively about programming skills. The best-programmed robot often wins the game along with its programmer who is a junior high student.

Line-follower Robots

This competition is one of the most popular games in the tournament. Robot should follow a black tape in a white background. Slopes, sharp angles, in more advanced levels reversing the ground colors, and broken lines make the game more challenging and exciting. The robot has to be meticulously programmed in this game.

Light-detector Robots

This is an attractive game for younger students (elementary and junior high grades). Robot has to search for and detect as many lights as possible in a certain time period. Hitting the pole under each light turns the next light on. This also triggers the touch sensor of the robot causing the lights-searching program to run again.

Innovation League

In this section, each team has the opportunity to demonstrate their innovative ideas embodied as a new robot. Robots designed to perform some special tasks, robotic inventions, and robots designed for other tournaments are of some possible examples.  

Painter Robot

This competition is dedicated to elementary school students. Students program their robots to draw different shapes such as the sun and house, or to write a word. Given the memory limitation, programming efficiency (proper use of loops for instance) enhances the performance of the robot, and will naturally lead to a higher rank in the competition.

Micro-mouse

In this competition, which is designed for high school students, robot is located on an arbitrary square in a chess-like grid. Using two touch-sensors the dimensions of the target square is fed into the robot, now the robot should use its program to move and locate itself on the target square.

Object-collector Robot

In this competition, robot follows a specific path, recognizes the cubes on its way, and relocates the cubes to the starting point. Designing a functioning gripping device is critical in this game as well as an efficient programming.

Runner Robot (humanoid)

This game is about acquainting elementary school students with mechanics of balance. There are restrictions on Robot’s minimum height and leaning surface which make it necessary to maintain a certain speed to avoid falling. Meanwhile, robot should try not to touch the walls by the use of its sensors.

Articles

This section, which is held alongside the tournament, trains students for writing articles in the format of a scientific journal. They submit the abstract and keywords through the website in advance, and present their paper in the time of tournament after being reviewed and evaluated. The articles should be exclusively about robots.