Fire Fighting Boat Robotics Competition

The first edition of the Fire Fighting Boat (FFB) robotics competition and it's the first of its kind in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region.

IEEE Egypt Section Egypt Japan University for Science and Technology (E-JUST) Student Branch, with the collaboration of E-JUST and the strategic partner NTRA, made the first edition of the Fire Fighting Boat (FFB) robotics competition and is the first of its kind in the MENA region. The competition was created to change the normal type of robotics water competitions and add a new and creative idea to it, FFB aims to raise awareness of the importance of robots and their uses, especially on the surface of the water. There were 155 participants including the guests, judges, visitors, and the competitors. The purpose of the competition is to create a robot that floats on water and puts out fire spots. The robot should be controlled by a wireless joystick, and the winners are determined by the scoring criteria in the rule book.

Competition registration teams started on 29/9/2022 and ended on 30/11/2022 online, with 18 teams with 87 competitors. There were 18 teams who registered for the competition, and they competed to win prizes by making creative and great ideas each robot was different from the others, we got 18 robots with 18 ideas, and this was our aim to help people think out of the box and make something simple and achieve the mission at the same time. The 18 teams were divided into academic and junior, academic participated with 14 teams and juniors participated with 4 teams and the maximum number of team members was 5 members with one supervisor, on the competition day there were 30 visitors from all around Egypt who came on the competition day to encourage the competitors.

The rule book was sent to all competitors once they registered and the scoring criteria were included in the rule book, we assigned a mentor for each group to follow up with the teams and help them if they struggled with anything and if they wanted to ask about anything related to the competition, in addition to making an online info session with all the registered teams to explain all the details of the competition with them and there were questions and answers on the last 15 minutes of the session to answer all their questions. The technical criteria depend mainly on the robot and achieving the mission: The boat starts with 300 points when each second passes decreases a point from the total points, distinguishing a fire spot increases the score by 100 points, If the boat hits the borders or obstacles will decrease by 5 points per hit, Troubleshooting the boat decreases 10 points without any time compensation, using a remote controller made by you gives 20 points per round and using a pre-made remote controller gives 10 points per round.

The competition total score was not only on the technical part but also on the teamwork part as our belief that team spirit is part of the success of the team so we added social media task that required the competitors to upload photos for all team members and upload short video from 1 to 3 minutes for them working on the robot as a team and show test of the robot if they tested it before the competition day and all these videos were uploaded on our Facebook page and FFB event https://www.facebook.com/IEEE.EJUST. The competition day was on 24/12/2022 from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, there were 2 rounds for the robots each round took from 2 to 5 minutes depending on the robot’s speed, on the first round they moved from the start point passing from the obstacles reached the end line, and then come back to the start point, and on the second round, they moved from the start point passing through the obstacles putting off the fire spot reaching o the end line and then return back to the start point.

The first three teams in the academic category were:

1-Titanic from Alexandria University

2-IEEE CUSB firestorm cooler from Cairo University

3-IEEE HTI from the higher technology institution.

The first three teams in the junior category were:

1-Jerry

2-The Pirates

3-Aqua.

The best design prize was for RASiots Team from Zagazig University.