The Robotics Innovation Challenge (RIC) is now launched and open for registration. As a new initiative associated with NUS-MIT Healthcare AI Datathon & EXPO, it welcomes students aged 8-15 years old to compete on their robotics design and programming skills.

RIC 2021 is supported by multiple schools from different disciplines in NUS and other organizations including MIT Critical Data, Science Centre Singapore, NVIDIA and etc. With the 2021 theme of “Healthcare with Robotics”, RIC hopes that in preparing for and participating in the competition, participants will learn more about healthcare and think about how to apply robotics in the healthcare domain.

• Date: July 30th – August 1st, 2021
• Venue: Science Centre Singapore
• Prizes: More than $1000 Cash to be won + medals, certificates, and gifts

Program Overview:

As an open-platform competition, RIC welcomes robots with all kinds of hardware and software to participate in the competitions.

• Grand Arena (GA) (offline event)

In the Grand Arena (GA), robots from the participating teams will play the role of drug R transporters and embark on a journey to help patients infected with COVID-19.  Along the way, the transporter will need to pick up drug particles, navigate through a hostile environment and eventually deliver the drug particles to the infected lung tissues precisely and promptly.

• Technical Competitions (TC) (offline event)

In the Technical Competitions (TC), the same robots used for GA can choose to participate in up to 3 different challenges, which require more sophisticated actions to be performed and push their limits to a whole new level. 

• Innovation Design Challenge (IDC) (online event)

Innovation Design Challenge (IDC) aims to challenge the level of creativity and hands-on ability of the participating teams. It requires participants to design and build a robot in approximately 4 months according to a predetermined theme each year. 

The theme of this year’s IDC is “Healthcare with Robotics”. Participants are expected to design a robot that can directly or indirectly provide assistance to various healthcare scenarios. Examples of healthcare scenarios include ambulance services, emergency care, inpatient care, surgeries, intensive care, home and community care, etc.

• Workshops (offline)

As part of RIC 2021, we are also organizing workshops to help students pick up the latest robotics technology. We have confirmed a workshop on NVIDIA Jetson Nano kits and it will be open only to the participants of RIC 2021.

For more details and future updates on the program, please refer to www.ric-robotics.com.