The robot ‘DESTROYER’ found its way to secure a place at the final round among the top 10 teams in the University category, in the RoboFest 2015 robotics competition in Sri Lanka.

The robot ‘DESTROYER’ was developed by a group of students from the first two years at the Faculty of Science, University of Colombo and they participated RoboFest 2015, the robotics competition which was held on 10th& 11th September 2015 at the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology- Faculty of Engineering, Sri Lanka.

This year’s challenge was to develop a line following robot which was able to collect, carry and unload a given cube. The robot had to detect the colour of the cube and act accordingly by placing it in the appropriate place in the arena. Our team was able to successfully develop a working system in order to complete the given task.

Our team of four members, Thilina Payagala, Hasith Perera, Thimira Thilakarathna and Shalitha Amarasinghe developed the robot “DESTROYER” by using an open source hardware and software platform. The robot was comprised of different types of sensors such as ultrasonic sensors, colour sensors and infrared sensors which were used to navigate throughout the challenge.

In addition to the robot DESTROYER team, there was another team representing the University of Colombo in the RoboFest 2015 robotics competition under the Open Category. Electrostatic adhesion was used to develop an actuator to handle fabrics. The team members are Rasika Manjujeewa, Chathunka Tennakoon, Dushan Dinushka, Sameera Viraj and Dhanuhska Dharmasiri.

The members from both teams took the opportunity to share their gratitude and special thanks to, Dr. Hiran Jayaweera, Dr. Mahesh Edirisinghe and Dr. M.K. Jayananda at faculty of Science University of Colombo, for inspiring them to believe in dreams once again and gave them hope for the future and also all members of the non-academic staff of Department of Physics for their support and encouragement. They also noted those who are interested in robotics to join these teams in the future.

Further, FOS Media team was able to catch a glimpse of ‘DESTROYER’ in action, in addition to views of some team members about the competition.