Pursuant to the task of the competition, the created kratt had to be as versatile and talented as possible, being able to identify the language spoken by the visitors, order a lift, an autonomous vehicle or to book rooms.

At the beginning, it was planned to only use the system in office buildings, but in the future, Ülemiste City has a definite plan to use it all over the campus, and online as well. 

‘With the help of technology, we can face the challenge of guiding people, and since solutions so far have not been flexible enough, we had the idea of organising such a competition with Robotex,” said Member of the Management Board of Mainor Ülemiste, Ursel Velve.

The € 1000 award went to the Latvian team SIG and their robot, SIG Kratt. Members of the team included Edgars Bajaruns, Andris Jenerts, Raivis Pauls, Mārtiņš Šmuikšis, Mārtiņš Zemlītis Siguldas. The Latvian team’s robot resolved most of the problems posed by the competition task, including knowing how to guide guests to the correct location in the Öpik house, giving guidelines on how to make a car park correctly, and entertaining a guest. All of this in two languages, as well. 

The team from Turkey’s Hatay Bahçeşehir secondary school, Zeus, who had created the voice-controlled moving robot Perseus, and who demonstrated at Robotex how a city of the future could operate, was also highlighted.

‘This year, we announced the competition quite late, which is why participating teams did not have a lot of time to prepare,’ said Velve. ‘Flexibility certainly exists in different prototype solutions; now we wait for it to be able to be interfaced with different systems.’

Ülemiste City is home to almost 400 companies, and is visited by tens of thousands of workers and hundreds of guests every day. However, the colourful city of the future is constantly being supplemented with new services and houses, which is why the need to solve the challenges related to guiding people also arose. 

The aim of the first stage of the Kratt competition was creating an interactive robot; the second stage will be held in 2020, and then it will be necessary to create a physical body for the Kratt.

The competition to find the Kratt was held in cooperation with Robotex, Ülemiste City and the Estonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences. The updated rules for the Robotex International 2020 competition will be published in February 2020.