Ghana robotic team wins World Robofest Championship

Team Acrobot from West Africa Ghana took first place in the Senior Game Division at the Robofest World Championships, held Saturday May 18 at Lawrence Technological University, in Southfield, Michigan.

Team Acrobot from the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation

Team Acro-Bot, nine girls from the Methodist Girls’ High School in the Eastern Region of Ghana, were trained at the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation, a robotics organization in Accra, Ghana’s capital city. The Foundation was founded in 2011 by Dr. Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, the Ghanaian Ghanaian robotics engineer at NASA, and the chief engineer and technical group leader for the mobility and manipulation group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The girls dominated the 10 broad and challenging categories of the championship held from May 16 to 18 at the Lawrence Technological University (LTU), Southfield, Michigan. One of their achievements was to build a robot that arranged boxes according to a binary number they were given during the competition.

Ghana also presented a team for the junior division called Team Cosmic Intellect. The team of five boys from the Mikrobot Academy in Ghana came 6th out of the overall 52 teams in the division.

Robofest competition

Robofest was invented in 1999 by LTU computer science professor C.J. Chung, and since inception has seen more than 28,000 students compete worldwide. The goal is to offer students the opportunity to master principles of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), Computer Science (CS)…

During Robofest, teams compete in the junior (grades 5-8), senior (grades 9-12), and college divisions in the following broad & challenging categories:

• A Game competition, which changes every year, is the most popular event, but there are also competitions in
• Bottle Sumo, a simple game in which robots try to push each other or a 2-liter pop bottle off a table;
• RoboParade, in which robots are judged on elaborate decorations as well as their ability to stay on a path;
• RoboArts, in which robots are programmed to accomplish artistic objectives like music or dance;
• Unknown Mission Challenge, in which students are given a task to complete with limited time to build a robot and write the software to accomplish it;
• Vision Centric Challenge, a competition for high school and college teams in machine vision;
• Camps: Hands-on workshop + Mini Competition
• Carnival: Hands-on STEM+ learning with interactive robots
• WISER: World conference on Integrated STEM Education through Robotics (High School Students, Parents, & Teachers
• Exhibition, where students dream up any task they choose, and design and program a robot to accomplish it.

Sources: Robofest.net