Romanian high school students from Timisoara, Bucharest, and Cluj-Napoca have made it among the finalists of Zero Robotics, an international robotics coding competition where the robots are SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites) inside the International Space Station. 

The competition started online in late-September, when, on the competition’s website, the teams programmed the SPHERES to solve an annual challenge. After several phases of virtual competition in a simulated environment that mimics the real SPHERES, the finalists were selected to compete in a live championship aboard the International Space Station. The students have written the codes to be implemented on their robots and, on January 25, an astronaut will conduct the championship competition in microgravity with a live broadcast.

The American teams will gather at the MIT headquarters to watch the games while the European ones will see the competition’s broadcast at the Euro Space Centre in Belgium.

There were five Romanian teams initially, but only three made it on the finalists list.

14 alliances will compete in the final. Romania’s VSA, together with SPHERES Tomsk (Russia) and Da Vinci Boys (Italy) form the Quasar alliance, Cassiopeia (Romania), Westwood Robotics (United States) and Awesome v3 (Belgium) make the Westiopeia v3 alliance, and Apoapsis (Australia), Callisto (Romania), KISS (Germany) form the Apocaliss alliance. Find all the alliances here.

The Romanian students will have to fly to Belgium to see the live broadcast of the competition.

Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: Zero Robotics on Facebook)