engineering

RoboMaster

RoboMaster is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand RoboMaster rather than just read about it. In short: RoboMaster (Chinese: 机甲大师; pinyin: Jījiǎ Dàshī) is an annual intercollegiate robot competition held in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. First started in 2015, it is the brainchild of DJI's founder and CEO Frank Wang, and jointly sponsored by the Communist Youth League Central Committee, the All-China Students' Federation (ACSF) and the Shenzhen City Government.

RoboMaster — illustration

Key takeaways

RoboMaster belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect RoboMaster to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of RoboMaster from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

RoboMaster (Chinese: 机甲大师; pinyin: Jījiǎ Dàshī) is an annual intercollegiate robot competition held in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. First started in 2015, it is the brainchild of DJI's founder and CEO Frank Wang, and jointly sponsored by the Communist Youth League Central Committee, the All-China Students' Federation (ACSF) and the Shenzhen City Government. It is the first shooting sport-style robotics competition in China. RoboMaster is one of the four major robotics competitions under the China University Robot Competition (Chinese: 全国大学生机器人大赛) banner, along with Robocon, ROBOTAC and the Robot Start-ups Competition. It currently includes four sub-competitions — the RoboMaster Robotics Competition, the RoboMaster Technical Challenge, the ICRA RoboMaster AI Challenge, and the new RoboMaster Youth Tournament.

History The competition's idea began in 2013 as a small-scale internal competition held inside DJI's headquarter office with a makeshift racecourse, a chance for engineers to blow off steam while still working on technology core to the company business. It later integrated with a summer camp for university students, with only 24 participants, who were tasked to achieve autonomous moving target shooting using computer vision. In 2014, this summer camp grew to 100 students, who were challenged to improve and upgrade prior technical designs via a series of 4-on-4 robot shooting matches. This was the foundation of the later RoboMaster competition. In 2015, Robomasters was first launched as a robotics competition. This competition introduced a confrontational 5-on-5 MOBA-style robot combat to the world for the first time, and over 3,000 university students all over Mainland China participated. In 2016, in order to improve the technical quality and competition experience, the organizing committee developed a new-generation robot referee system, and required each teams to have 6 units featuring 1 Hero, 3 Standard, 1 Base and 1 Aerial robots in their lineup in the 2nd Robomasters competition. This is also the first year Robomasters included teams from outside Mainland China, with universities from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan participating. On September 29, 2017, the competition was officially renamed to RoboMaster, upgraded to 7 robots per team, and developed into a competition that demands the comprehensive skills involving all science and engineering disciplines. In addition, RoboMaster also added the Technical Challenge series, and co-hosted with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) the first IRCA AI Challenge in Singapore. In 2018, the 4th RoboMaster Robotics Competition added extra technical requirements for features such as the loading and launching mechanism requirements for Sentry and Aerial robots, and focused heavily on training practical engineering personnels, attracting nearly 200 global teams. In the same year, DJI held the 2nd ICRA AI Challenge in Australia, focusing on robotics academic research. In 2019, the RoboMaster competition sports a total prize pool of 3,750,000 RMB (US$600,000), with 500,000 RMB (US$75,000) for the winning team. In addition to the prize money, winners can achieve celebrity status among the 6 million fans who watch livestream online. According to DJI's CEO Frank Wang, RoboMaster is his passion project for engineers "to have a stage, a competition, to become loved by lots of people, to show their wisdom, show their precision", and the tournament was designed to "make superstars out of nerdy college students", and in doing so, boost interest in the field of robotic engineering. By sponsoring a popular competition, DJI can also set itself up to be the default industrial platform, as almost every major robotics program at Chinese universities now use DJI's infrastructure. The 2020 competition was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, while competitions were also impacted by the pandemic, some did occur across China, in addition to the first North American RoboMaster University League competition held at the Texas A&M University campus in College Station, Texas. The North American competition included 1v1 and 3v3 events. A union team of RoboX from Pennsylvania State University and Telpochcalli of Tecnológico de Monterrey was named champions of the 2021 1v1 North American competition, and ARUW from the University of Washington was champion of the 2021 3v3 North American competition.

Competitions

RoboMaster Robotics Competition

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with RoboMaster

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what RoboMaster claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to RoboMaster before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about RoboMaster ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of RoboMaster

In research: RoboMaster appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses RoboMaster in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: RoboMaster is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Recurring events established in 2015, Robotics competitions, Shenzhen, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for RoboMaster outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study RoboMaster in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what RoboMaster means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain RoboMaster out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is RoboMaster in simple terms?

Why does RoboMaster matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study RoboMaster?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on RoboMaster.