Students from Samara University won Russia’s first hackathon on programming anthropomorphic robots – the ROS Humanoid Hack.
The hackathon took place in St. Petersburg and brought together 35 participants from 17 teams. Over the course of a week, they had to program a digital twin of the Unitree G1 anthropomorphic robot in the NVIDIA Isaac Sim simulator: configure its movement, navigation, map processing, and solve a series of applied tasks.
The university’s team, "Humane," emerged as the winner. The team included Ilya Borodkin, Mikhail Zagorin, and Olga Zagorina. All three are postgraduate students in the field of "Thermal, Electric Rocket Engines and Power Plants for Aircraft" and work at the university.
Within a week, the young specialists solved 5 out of 6 competition tasks, with particular focus on mapping and orienting the robot’s digital twin on the constructed map.
“It was our first time working with this simulator – we had to figure out a lot on the go. But our experience with industrial and mobile robotics helped. We are very happy about the win: what matters most here is not just the prize, but the opportunity to gain practical experience working with a digital twin of an anthropomorphic robot,” noted the team members.
