The competition, an initiative of the Faculty’s Leumi’s Robotics Center, is for vehicle-like small mobile robots that operate in an arena that simulates a road, including intersections, traffic lights, road signs and checkpoints. During the competition, the robots move autonomously in scenarios that simulate real-life situations on the road while preventing accidents and observing traffic laws. As part of the work on the competition, the Robotics Center developed Safe Roads embedded with sensors that communicate with the cars-robots. These roads provide an automatic response of the vehicle to obstacle signals and traffic lights.
The competition is named after the late Nadav Shoham, who was a graduate student at the Technion and lost his life in an avalanche in Nepal. Nadav was an enthusiastic supporter of technological education – from his great love of robotics, he established a robotics class at his high school and devoted many hours to teaching students.
This year, the competition was held online and on the Technion campus, in cooperation with YTEK. About 200 groups from high schools, junior high schools and elementary schools from Israel, the United States, Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Vietnam and Taiwan participated.
