The Faculty of Mechanical Engineering has never seen such a duel of robots designed by high school students in the Robots@FSI competition. The sumo-robot fight took place on an inclined platform, which moved and tilted on its own thanks to a robotic arm. In the end, the robot of the DSSG team from the Smíchov Secondary School of Industry and Gymnasium in Prague stood the best.

The traditional competition, where the students' task is to create and program a robot from the LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit, was held for the seventh time on Monday 30 January at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. This year, 32 teams qualified, with 9 making it to the finals.

One of them was team Tečka. "There are three of us from two different schools: from the Brno secondary school in Olomoucká Street and from Strážnice. We were attracted to the competition by robotics, but also by the possibility to get a waiver from the entrance exams to the faculty," explained Jan Vavřík, who was in the Tečka team together with his friends Adam Doležal and Miroslav Ševčík. They tried to deal with the question of how to keep their sumo-robot on a slant and at the same time beat their opponents in their own way. "The first model of the robot was discarded, now we are creating a second one, a tracked one, which has a low centre of gravity and we hope it will be stable," said Honza.

Of the team, only Adam had experience with robotics, but even so, Tečka coped well with the challenge and finished in 6th place. The robot of the DSSG team from Smíchov Secondary Industrial School and Gymnasium did the best.

The competition was traditionally held under the auspices of the Mechatronics Laboratory of FSI. The main partner of the competition is Garrett Motion Czech Republic s.r.o. In addition to prizes, the top-placed teams also received a waiver of the entrance exam to the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of Brno University of Technology. Those who take advantage of it may also encounter the LEGO kit at university when studying mechatronics.