The 2013-2014 International Robot PRIDE Competition, 21-22 June 2014, UiTM Shah Alam, Malaysia

Assalamualaikum and hello everyone

(blowing at cobwebs... J )

I miss writing in this space. Pardon me for the long silence.

The photos for this post has been sitting in my HDD for almost two months now. Need to write about this event or risk forgetting all about it.

I've mentioned in a previous post about the PRIDE competition. Alhamdulillah, this robotic 'gathering' had taken place as planned at the Dewan Sri Budiman, UiTM Shah Alam from 21-22 June 2014.

Some forewords from the Honorary Chair of PRIDE 2013-2014, Dr Hanafiah Yussof:

"It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2nd 2013-2014 International Robot PRIDE Competition (PRIDE2013-2014). This is the second edition of PRIDE competition, where it was firstly organized in September 2012 in at Kuching Sarawak. This year, PRIDE highlights the theme “Technology for Domestic Used and Disabled Community”. This is part of our nation’s effort and vision to promote and encourage creative ideas and innovations towards better quality of life for humanity and communities of the disabled.

PRIDE aims to promote robotics and technology that supports robotics in a competition where evaluation is based on Performance, Reliability, Innovation, Design and Exploratory. PRIDE focuses on fundamental and application using creative engineering and computer technologies towards potential exploration as commercial products. On behalf of the PRIDE 2013-2014 organizing team, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all teams that have submitted their proposals to PRIDE, and congratulate the teams that have qualified to the final round. We wish you all the best in the competition. The organizers are very grateful with the support from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Education Malaysia and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation for the support and endorsement to organize this competition. I am also grateful for with the support from all.

Once again, it is our great honor and pleasure to welcome you to PRIDE 2013-2014. We wish all the best to all teams and we hope this event will become a platform to promote your ideas and invention towards commercialization."

PRIDE is an international robotic competition that aims to promote robots to our society, across all ages. That is why we can see young kids, teenagers, university researchers and lecturers coming to PRIDE competition. Robots will play a huge part in our lives in the future and an event like will give more exposure on to how robots are capable of, other that just machines that does assembling jobs in factories.

Basically there are 2 categories. The regular category is for schools, universities and also open to participants from the industry to present an original product or system. For the robot dance category, participating teams will present 5 minutes original robot dance performance. Performance includes musical dance and songs performed by the robot. I took part in the university group with another researcher, Azfar (check out his blog here).

Check out some of the memorable, exciting pictures taken during the event. There are actually more than 600 photos taken, so these are the selected ones.