Canada - 1

On Monday, June 15th we left Venice headed for Toronto. Despite our flight accumulating about an hour and a half of delay, we landed in Canada in the late afternoon local time — ready to start a new experience.

The next day, Tuesday the 16th, we visited part of the city of Toronto, including the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and one of the Toronto Islands. In between there were plenty of judging rehearsals and presentations of our technical and innovative project, soon to be the focus of an important evaluation in the competition.

On Wednesday we headed to the competition venue, at Brock University. After setting up our team pit, we attended the opening ceremony: 100 teams from all over the world, generally one per country, all gathered in the same place. Walking into a hall like that, with teams coming from every corner of the planet who share the same passion for robotics, is an experience that’s hard to describe.

Thursday morning brought the first big challenge of the competition: judging. We presented both our robot design — the engineering choices behind our robot, the mechanics and the programming — and our innovation project, Space4Arch. The idea behind the latter is to support archaeologists during excavation campaigns, combining an artifact management app with a wearable platform designed to improve posture and comfort in the field. A second module then handles tracking artifacts in storage, to reduce the risk of losing them after excavation.

The jury, made up of university professors and industry experts, showed genuine interest. The follow-up questions that came next gave us the chance to go deeper on a few points, covering our knowledge of archaeology gained through many meetings with experts and researchers in the field, as well as our advanced programming techniques and control systems.

In the afternoon we finally brought the robot onto the field. Practice sessions during an international competition are always limited, so every run counts. We used the available time to fix the last issues and head into the official rounds in the best possible shape. 🤖