UMM Team Wins Indonesian SAR Robot Contest

The UMM team succeeded in winning the regional SAR robot competition. (Photo: Istimewah)

The Indonesian Search and Rescue Robot Contest (KRSRI) will be held again in 2021. Unlike previous years where the contestant robots only blow out candles, this year, the competed robots must also rescue potential victims to a safe place. The Dome team from the University of Muhammadiyah Malang (UMM) won second place in the regional stage from 42 groups in the contest. The competition organized by the National Achievement Center (Puspresnas) of the Ministry of Education and Culture announced the winners on Tuesday (28/09).

One of the team members, Faizal Aditya, said that this competition contains several specifications that the contested robot must own. First, the robot is an autonomous robot without an operator and a guideline. Second, it can overcome various sensor and terrain obstacles and extinguish the fire on the candle. Third, it can save potential victims and bring them to a safe zone.

"In this year's competition, the track is given more challenging obstacles. This is done as a manifestation of the irregular environment that SAR robots usually face in disaster areas," said the Electrical Engineering Study Program (Prodi).

Faizal said that in the competition, the UMM Dome team included a legged SAR robot. This robot is equipped with specifications that have been determined by the competition committee, such as gas to extinguish the fire and a gripper to rescue victims to a safe place. The eldest of three brothers said that the process of making this robot took almost a year.

"We started working on making this robot after we finished participating in the KRSRI contest last year. In the process, we faced several obstacles, such as the robot having difficulty detecting the victims who wanted to be rescued. Because it could not detect, the robot had an error in the second session of the race. To overcome this problem, we are refining the algorithm for the victim detection program to minimize the failure of the detection process," said the student from Malang.

In this competition, Faizal was accompanied by Muhammad Indra Pratama, Muhammad Ardy Rahman, and Aditya Nugraha Putra from the Electrical Engineering Study Program. Faizal hopes that in the future, he and his team will be able to defend the championship at the national level, which will hold on 12 October. "We also hope to be able to defend this champion in the following year with different obstacles and arenas," he concluded at the end of the interview. (syi/wil)