robotika.cz
the homepage of Czech roboteers

Our goal is to develop comprehensive site about robotics for the widest audience. It should cover both hardware (construction of physical devices) and software (control and algorithms).

There are several top level sections. In section articles you can find stories about hard gained experience and interesting topics from the world of robotics. If you are interested rather in complete robots (mostly Czech origin) then have a look at robots section. Various kinds of competitions are perfect motivation for our work. It is also the best way to start with robotics. The competitions section is currently the largest section of our site. In addition to rules, it contains notes about preparation and participation of both contestants and visitors. Recently we have started new section guide in the hopes of creating the ABC of mobile robotics (sorry, it is so far mostly in Czech).

If you have built a robot, have a product we could use, or have some interesting experiences with robots that you would want to share do not hesitate to contact us. We are always looking for new and/or interesting products for our new projects. Our mission statement is to unite as many roboteers as possible in a community based on helpfulness, knowledge sharing and mutual support.

News box you see on the left side can also show all the great links you have found. Just let us know.

Featured Content

Robotour 2010 — robotika.cz outdoor delivery challenge Fifth year of this autonomous outdoor robot contest will be held on 18th September 2010. It will take place in Slovakia in one of the preselected parks in Bratislava. In contrast to previous years robots will get only map and coordinates of destination. Note, that robots will not know their exact starting position and interaction with operator will be reduced to entering destination. Robot successfully solving this task should be able to demonstrate its navigation in any park with corresponding map.

Results — LEE confirms the last year victory The winner of Robotour 2009 is for the second time the team LEE from Prague. The second place belongs to Roboauto from Brno (with two robots) and the third place fight out Radiklub Písek, competing with three robots. Congratulations! Especially 2nd and 3rd places were celebrated that night quite seriously …

Invitation to Brno — Robotour 2009, exhibition, lectures ... On 26th of September 2009 there will be ,,The Day of Robotics'' in Brno, park Lužánky (from 9:30am to 5:30pm). Besides 4th year of international contest of autonomous outdoor robots: „Robotour - robotika.cz outdoor delivery challenge”, you will see various exhibits and you could attend thematic lectures …

Field Robot 2009 — competition of robots in maize field In order to extend our robotic horizons we participated in Field Robot Event (FRE) contest. The motivation for this contest is automated agricultural machinery. There are four categories/tasks: navigation (pass through curved rows of maize), advanced navigation (extra transitions between straight rows of various length), weed control (spay randomly dropped green golf balls/weeds in the row as precise as possible) and free-style (show something interesting related to agriculture topic).

Robotour 2009 — robotika.cz outdoor delivery challenge The fourth year of this autonomous outdoor robot contest will be held in park Lužánky, Brno. Besides the new location the novelty is simultaneous start of all robots from unknown positions. More space will be also dedicated to „free style” category. From previous years remains obstacle avoidance, payload delivery and the possibility of robot cooperation. Each team can again deploy up to 3 machines.

Robotour 2008 — robotika.cz outdoor delivery challenge The third year of an autonomous outdoor robot contest will be held again in park Stromovka, Prague. In comparison to the previous years the robots should be more autonomous while traveling on the paved park roads (no manual intervention allowed this time) and while avoiding or at least detecting obstacles (this was previously not required). Extra points for carrying payload and cooperation of up to three robots in one team remain form previous years.

Results — Robohemia is winner of Robotour 2007 contest! This year's presence was much better than last year. There were fifteen teams registered, come twelve, and almost all homologate. Moreover Bender I Team, winner of the last year contest, arrived and participated too. Shortly there were many interesting things to see. So how was it in detail?

Teams Introduction — how many teams/robots are expected? Robotour 2007 contest is getting closer (Saturday, September 22nd 2007 (10-17h), park Stromovka near Planetarium Praha building) so it is almost time to make some small teams overview. The teams are already for months preparing their robots for the contest. As you will see the spectrum of this year robots is quite wide: from small RC controlled cars to expensive commercial robots like Pioneer3. Currently there are 15 teams registered.

Eurobot 2006 — Funny Golf Funny Golf is the theme of the international Eurobot 2006 competition. The task of autonomous robots is to place as many white balls as possible into the right holes, black balls can be used to block opponents holes. The international finale is going to be in Catania (Sicilia, Italy) during 1st-4th June 2006. The Czech National Cup will be on 12th and 13th May 2006. The Cup is open for foreign teams. Also this year we sincerely invite all general public.

Ester — 4th place in La-Ferté Bernard, France, Eurobot 2004 Eurobot 2004 has passed and for the curious who are interested how a fourth rank can be achieved at such a contest, we have gathered some information about Ester. Right now you can find here articles about the ball manipulation and the control software. We hope that the amount of information will increase gradually (e.g. articles about localization or movement control are in preparation).

Ferda a Fatima — Merkur robots for Eurobot 2005 Ferda and Fatima is a pair of simple robots controlled by microcontroller ATmega8. Our goal was to show that even with very simple electronics and mechanics (Merkur construction set, a czech version of Meccano) it is possible to participate in the Eurobot competition. It is also an example how your first robot could look like if you plan to start with robotics.

RoboRat — Robutek II is still alive Two years ago I published an article about creation of my robot Robutek II. I also promissed some kind of “open-end” series, but unfortunately only the first article was written. The good news is that I had more time for playing, so there are many new things on the robot. Are you still interested in what happened with Robutek II?

Darwin2K — Simulation and Automated Synthesis for Robotics Darwin2K is a free, open-source toolkit for robot simulation and automated design. It features numerous simulation capabilities and an evolutionary algorithm capable of automatically synthesizing and optimizing robot designs to meet task-specific performance objectives. Darwin2K uses Parameterized Module Configuration Graph (PMCG) to represent the robots. As the name implies, robots are composed of modules, each of which may contain parameters describing properties of the module. You can build your own robot or let Darwin2k design one for you from the modules of your choosing for the task at hand.