A TEAM FROM FEEIT WON THE GOLD MEDAL AT THE 7th INTERNATIONAL CONTEST HARDWARE & SOFTWARE, H&S 2011 IN NOVI SAD, SERBIA

A team of students from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies claimed the First Prize at the 7th International Contest Hardware & Software, H&S 2011, held at the Faculty of Technical Sciences of Novi Sad, Serbia, from 24-28 October, 2011. In what was a fierce competition of 7 teams comprising three teams from Romania, two from Serbia and one from Bosnia and Herzegovina, after four days of intense and dedicated work averaging 18 hours per day, the team of students from FEEIT proved to be of the highest quality.

The task this year was the realization of a system for autonomous research of unknown terrain, akin to the Mars Rover. The system was comprised of an RP6 robot, RFID reader, GPRS modem, gyroscope, dsPIC microcontroller and a Personal Computer. The robot’s mission was to autonomously locate and read a defined sequence of RFID cards in a given terrain. The robot sends the read RFID codes via the GPRS modem to the Personal Computer, which plays the role of a Command and Data Acquisition Center. The PC plots the path trajectory of the robot, decodes the RFID codes and displays the corresponding words onscreen. The development of a Graphical User Interface, a Database, and a Web-interface was also required. The robot’s “intelligence” to quickly and precisely locate the RFID card sequence was crucial in the jury’s scoring process, and it is where the FEEIT team triumphed.

The team, in the spirit of the Contest’s name, was combined of students of the two FEEIT study programmes: Igor Simevski and Martin Cvetkovski from Informatics and Computer Engineering, and Lazo Dimitrievski and Stojan Mateski from Electronics, Radiotechnics and Signal Processing. The team was lead by Darko Cvetkovski and Branislav Gerazov, under the mentorship of prof. d-r Goce Arsov, all from the Department of Electronics at FEEIT.

This victory is proof of the high-quality of education at FEEIT on the international level, and is the result of the nurture of multiple modern areas in electrical engineering, in particular Embedded systems.

Figure 1 – Award ceremony: (left to right) Miloš Slankamenac (member of Organizing Committee), Martin Cvetkovski, Darko Cvetkovski, Goce Arsov, Lazo Dimitrievski, Branislav Gerazov, Stojan Mateski, Igor Simevski and Miloš Živanov (President of Organizing Committee)

Figure 2 – The finalized robotic system designed by the FEEIT team

The video from the final presentation of the FEEIT team at competition can be found here.