18 April 2016

A team of young robotics engineers from Moscow swept the 8th all-Russian robotics festival RoboFest held by Volnoe Delo Oleg Deripaska Foundation and the Russian Ministry of Education and Science on April 12-15. Teams from Saint-Petersburg and Krasnodar region took second and third places respectively. The festival was also supported by the Agency for strategic initiatives. GAZ group and En+ company (both are part of Basic Element group) were strategic partners of the event. 

A total of 141 Moscow teams, represented by 400 members, swept the competition by winning 45 prizes, 15 of which were gold medals. They participated in most of the 27 disciplines. All in all Muscovites were awarded with 15 gold, 14 silver and 16 bronze medals and won 19 nominations. 

The representatives of Saint-Petersburg were second in the overall ranking with 17 medals: 7 gold, 5 silver and 5 bronze ones.

The third place in total ranking was occupied by the delegation from Krasnodar region. It was one of the largest and included 69 teams of more than 230 participants. Young robotics engineers from Kuban won 9 medals, three of which were gold. The region's representatives became first in the youngest group of the Draftsman nomination in Hello, Robot! START discipline, in elder group of Classifier nomination of the same discipline as well as in the elder group of the Trajectory nomination of the Hello, Robot! PROFI discipline.

All in all, there were 36 representatives of Russian regions among the winners. Belarus team won the Innovative approach nomination in the Engineering project discipline.

This year RoboFest has set a new record attracting 1,000 teams from 69 Russian regions of more than 3,500 students and schoolchildren aged 6-25 as well as participants from Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Last year about 600 teams of 3,000 participants took part in the event. This year there were 27 disciplines to compete at including two new ones: JuniorSkills and Autonet. The disciplines’ winners will represent Russia at international robotic competitions in the USA, Europe and South-East Asia.

The festival has been held since 2009 and it is a key event of the Volnoe Delo's Robotics: Engineering Cadres of Innovative Russia program that exists since 2008. The program's participants are schoolchildren and students aged 6-30. Nowadays, there are more than 30,000 of them in 69 Russian regions. Robotics’ aim is to raise new engineers for Russian industry beginning from secondary school. More than 30% of the program's participants have become students of technical universities and study engineering since 2008.

You can learn more about RoboFest on the festival’s official website: www.russianrobofest.ru