In China, every year, more than 8,000 college students from more than 300 colleges and universities, more than 1,000 college teachers, silently study and fight in 365 days and nights a year, just to participate in the two-day national college student robot competition RoboMaster Mecha Master Super Confrontation, and after the difficult confrontation, let their team flag hang in the Spring Cocoon Gymnasium as the final honor.
On March 12, the third season of the National College Student Robot Competition RoboMaster "Mecha Master" documentary was officially launched, with the university participants and young engineers as the main body, "Mecha Master" recorded the story of the 2021 season of the university teams for a year, "popular science" to the general public what is the RoboMaster Mecha Masters, but also showed the courage and passion of young students who devote themselves to this love.
Mecha Master Season 3 poster
Meet the RoboMaster Mech Masters
"Two games a year of preparation, two games of cool play", "Wake up, check in", "RM team: from entry to cervical rehabilitation", "Addicted to RM, emaciated day by day" "This code is open"... It's a self-deprecating joke circulating among the RoboMaster Mecha Master Super Match players.
Founded in 2013, roboMaster Mecha Master College Series is a platform for robot competition and communication built for technology enthusiasts. Different from the general virtual competitive game, the mecha master series events require the participants to form a mecha team, independently develop and produce a variety of robots to participate in team competition, they need to overcome various difficulties in order to better participate in the competition to make stronger intelligent robots.
At present, the RoboMaster Mecha Master College Series has developed into three competition systems, including the "College Series" for university groups, the "Youth Challenge" for K12 groups, and the "National Challenge" for the public.
The Mech Masters Super Match is underway
The Mecha Masters Super Confrontation (RMUC) is the highlight of the "College Series" with more competitive and technical difficulties, and is an annual robot competition for college students around the world, with a research and development cycle of up to 1 year per tournament, while the competition time is only 2 days. This competition focuses on the comprehensive application and engineering practice ability of the participants to the science and engineering disciplines, integrates many robot-related technical disciplines such as "machine vision", "embedded system design", "mechanical control", "inertial navigation" and "human-computer interaction", and combines the presentation of e-sports with robot competition, making the robot confrontation more intuitive and intense.
The two sides need to independently develop different types and functions of robots, conduct tactical confrontation in the designated playing field, and attack enemy robots and bases by controlling robots to launch projectiles. At the end of the match, the side with the highest remaining health in the base wins the game.
The Mecha Masters documentary begins with the 2021 season of the RoboMaster Mecha Masters Super Tournament.
The Mecha Masters, which combines esports and robots, is a bit more complex in terms of programming, and as a robot versus tournament, each team in roboMaster needs to prepare at least 4 robots with different functions. From a page of parts drawings and a line of code on a computer to a real, dynamic robot on a processing table, each of these teenage students is done by themselves.
Mechanics and programming are the core technologies of RoboMaster, these students have their own division of labor and professional fields, they need to break down academic barriers early and form a complete team, and a fully functional robot requires continuous discussion among the members of the group, requires unremitting efforts and repeated improvement and polishing, which is also the focus of the documentary.
Robots with a variety of different functions
Robots are in confrontation
About blood and youth
Looking back at the previous various film and television dramas, such as "Dear, Beloved" and "Full-time Master", they have joined the track of e-sports, and in the 2021 "League of Legends" global finals, the EDG team in China's LPL division has won the championship to make the whole network boil, and e-sports has been transformed from a simple and somewhat negative identification of "playing games" to a narrative about blood and youth.
The "Mecha Master" documentary also continues the consistent presentation style of e-sports themes - focusing on the passion and value realization shown by young people in it.
Stills from the third season of Mech Master
The documentary selects several representative teams, such as the absolute strong - Northeastern University, the resentful hero who always misses the championship - South China University of Technology, the Harbin Institute of Technology, which is good at breaking through itself, and the team of "grassroots origin" - the team from the Zhejiang Textile and Garment Vocational and Technical College.
The South China University of Technology team called itself the "South China Tigers" and even used this as an incentive to post posters of their opponents holding aside their trophies to celebrate when they won. The engineering robots of the I Hiter team of Harbin Institute of Technology had a fatal failure two hours before the decisive battle, and they had to rebuild the robot at a speed of 20 times faster than usual to qualify for the championship. The team of Zhejiang Textile and Garment Vocational and Technical College of the junior college showed another possibility - even if the "origin" is not good, it must have dreams and the courage to "touch" with the strong team on the field.
Screenshot of The Third Season of MechMaster
Many "dangerous situations" that may occur at any time make the RoboMaster Mecha Masters full of fatalism and sadness, and the absolute strength and weakness caused by technical barriers also show the "difference of the world".
RoboMaster is undoubtedly a high technical barrier to entry, and the input cost is far more than that of many peer competitions, including materials, but also time and energy. Every contestant needs to maintain a high degree of concentration in R&D over the course of a year. Jin Zixu of Harbin Institute of Technology once said that if he had not met RoboMaster, he would probably become a "scholar" in the eyes of most people, get a direct doctoral degree in Baoyan, and embark on another life path.
Huang Yin, consultant of the RoboFuture team at Zhejiang Textile and Garment Vocational and Technical College, said: "I have fallen in love with this team for a year and missed this past for a lifetime. In addition to the run-in between the team members, long-term "getting along" also allows the contestants to establish a strong emotional connection with their robots, which is another key content in the documentary, and the intensity of this emotion even exceeds the simple "group soul".
Although there is not much focus on the robot itself, the documentary still shows a kind of concern for the vision of the industry, as if to justify such competitions, such as the south China University of Technology team instructor in the film talking about the technology students put into the competition robot in the future can be applied to entrepreneurship. According to reports, RoboMaster attracts tens of thousands of young engineers from all over the world to participate in it every year, and carries out various industry-university-research cooperation projects such as talent training and laboratory co-construction with hundreds of universities.
Zhang Dong, instructor of the South China Tigers of South China University of Technology
The story of 2021 belonging to RoboMaster has come to an end, and the story of the 2022 season is about to begin, it is understood that as the pioneer of the Mecha Master series of events, roboMaster University League Competition officially landed in 10 provinces and cities across the country in March, taking the lead in Heilongjiang Station and Zhejiang Station.