- The NilARMstrong team captured the grand prize and 2 million won in prize money at the joint finals, while the ABOT team took home a runner-up citation and 60,000 won.
- Competitors programmed robots to move through a simulated smart greenhouse, identify ripe fruits using computer vision, and harvest them with robotic arms.
The Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery hosted the multi-stage competition to build practical skills in smart farming and agricultural automation, Cheongju Ilbo reported.
The event brought together university and graduate students from across the country to showcase hardware designs and software code.
Final rounds took place on November 6 at EXCO in Daegu for the seventh competition, and on November 10 in Haenam County, South Jeolla Province, for the eighth event.
Student competitors faced strict automated harvesting tests inside a 4-meter by 2-meter model smart greenhouse. Robots had to rely on onboard cameras and vision sensors to locate produce, detach it with an attached arm, and load it onto a mobile carrier for transport to a simulated unloading station.
The eighth contest in Haenam added a strict classification task that required algorithms to separate ripe produce from unripe specimens using machine learning.
“We felt a great sense of accomplishment by taking on the unfamiliar field of robotics to learn and implement the technology ourselves,” the team members told Cheongju Ilbo.
The students used ROS2 middleware to sync their wheeled chassis and robotic arm. They trained a YOLO11 object detection model on pumpkin data to pinpoint fruit locations and isolate ripe items based on color filtering.
Hardware components often behaved differently than simulated models, forcing the students to re-evaluate their code and debug physical connections.
“While winning an award is nice, experiencing the process of actually implementing the technology we learned about in class was the most valuable outcome,” team members told Cheongju Ilbo. They plan to use lessons from the contest failures to fuel future research and development.
