TEHRAN — A team of Iranian students, called Rahart, from Tabriz, East Azarbaijan province, secured the 4th place at 2018 World Robot Olympiad (WRO) Open Category Elementary, IRNA news agency reported.

The competition was held on November 16 - 18, 2018 in Chiang Mai Thailand. First held in 2004 in Singapore, it now attracts more than 20,000 teams from nearly 60 countries. 

The Iranian team secured the fourth place after teams from Malaysia, the Philippines and Russia. 

Moreover another Iranian team, called Green Land, also came in the 11th place in Open Category Junior. 

This year's WRO theme is “food matters”, it focuses on the way we grow, share and consume food. It is an important theme, because one in nine people in the world today (795 million people) are undernourished. And with a growing population in the world, more and more food needs to be produced every year. We can use technology to help grow more and better food and reduce food waste.

The competition consists of 4 different categories, Regular, College, Open and Soccer and for the Regular and Open categories, it consists of three different age groups: Elementary, Junior High and Senior High.

The Open Category is a project based competition. Students create their own intelligent robotics solution relating to the current theme of the season. Teams will present their project and their robot model to a group of judges on the competition day.

The mission of Open category this year was to build a robot that supports the way we grow, share and consume food. The project should have focused around at least one of the following aspects of the Goal 2 of sustainable development: promote sustainable agriculture, improve nutrition, achieve food security, and end hunger. 

The Regular Category is a challenge based competition. Students must design, construct and program their robots to solve specific challenges on a field. Points are scored for completed tasks. The teams bring their robot completely disassembled. In the first part of the competition they will have 150 minutes to assemble their robots from loose parts without instructions.

WRO Football is a fun and exciting game with teams of two autonomous robots playing football (soccer). Every year little changes are introduced for the game to motivate the students to keep on developing their robots. Teams need two robots to participate in WRO Football. The controller, motors and sensors used to assemble robots must be from LEGO® MINDSTORMS® sets (NXT or EV3). The teams bring their robot completely disassembled. In the first part of the competition they will have 120 minutes to assemble their robots from loose parts without instructions.

The Advanced Robotics Challenge (ARC) is our newest category. The games are designed to test older and more experienced student’s engineering and programming skills to the limit. Teams compete on a set challenge. The maximum time differs depending on each competition. In the 2017 season it was introduced the Tetra stack challenge.

MQ/