From campus amateur to world champion

As the summer vacation approaches, Wu Ruixing, 21, a junior from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), is busy planning his final undergraduate year. Besides preparing for the upcoming exams for graduate studies admission, Wu, as the leader of a VEX robotics world champion team, is also thinking about the team's future.

Founded in 2018, the SJTU VEX team has an enviable record in VEX Robotics Competitions at all levels, during which students in more than 20,000 teams from 50 countries are tasked with designing and building a robot to compete against other teams in a game-based engineering challenge. For the 2022-2023 competition season, Wu led his team to win the world championship.

A total of 80 university teams from over 40 countries and regions attended the 2022-2023 VEX Robotics World Championship, which was held in Dallas, Texas, the United States, in April. During the ten-day competition, the student participants from SJTU won awards, including the EX U Robot Skills Challenge World Champion and the Design Division Champion.

Wu still feels thrilled when talking about their journey to the top. "For most of us, including me, it was our first time taking part in the World Championship, which was both motivating and somewhat overwhelming. We had been burning the midnight oil for a while to prepare for the competition, but it all became worth it when we got to lift the championship trophy," he said.

During the World Championship, something unexpected happened which bolstered Wu's sense of national pride. During the opening ceremony, Wu, also the flag bearer of the Chinese delegation, found that the Chinese national flag provided by the organizers was flawed. "There was something wrong with the pattern on the flag, so I insisted that the organizers provide a correct one," Wu said. With the efforts of Wu and the other Chinese students, a correct national flag was brought in at the last minute.

But the incident didn't affect the team's performance that day. The object of this year's game, Spin Up, was to attain a higher score than the opposing robotics team by scoring discs in baskets and finishing additional tasks in the Head-to-Head Matches. Teams may also compete in Robot Skills Matches, where the robots try to score as many points as possible. During the Robot Skills Matches, Wu's team was leading all the way thanks to their outstanding robotic design and coding skills, and once finished more than 100 points ahead of their nearest rival. "Everyone on the field spoke highly of us," Wu said.

As a global platform, the competition enabled the students to communicate with and learn from their peers from all over the world. Wu was deeply impressed by the unique robotic designs from other universities, including Arizona State University and the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. "They were both strong opponents. Wisconsin was a good defender and Team Pyro from Arizona State University provided a brand-new game strategy that really blew my mind. They even installed a device on the robot to blow the opponent's discs away from the basket!" Wu recalled.

Returning home with these fruitful results, the team became overnight celebrities on campus, but Wu hasn't let the success get to his head. "It took us more than six months to finish the robots for the World Championship, and now we need to start preparing for the new competition season during summer vacation," he said.

He also plans to expand the team — which currently consists of around 50 people — and establish a reserve team. "We are welcoming even more of our fellow students to join us as it's not just about the competition. It's about collaboration, growth and the shared pursuit of knowledge," Wu noted.

For Wu, it is the competition that helped him find a deeper passion for robotics. He has had a love for robotics since childhood and chose to study mechanical engineering at university. So when he heard that there was a robotics competition on campus a year and a half ago, he and some of his friends decided to sign up. "During that competition, I could see a big gap between me and the top players, which motivated me to join the team and get more experience and training," he said. Driven by his interest and indomitable spirit, Wu began participating in various competitions. "These experiences have also helped me with my studies. For example, I once designed a jumping robot for my coursework and won the first prize in an academic activity at school, deepening my love for the subject," he said.

Now as a world champion, Wu is even more determined to pursue an academic career in robotics, and he hopes that his team will continue to engage and interact with even more robot lovers in the future. "We have built an open-source community where robot lovers worldwide can work and grow together," he said.

wangxingwei@i21st.cn