The German preliminary round of the annual Eurobot competition took place at the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen (THM). THM was represented by the student working group "Mobile Autonomous Modular Universal Technology (MAMUT) Robotics," whose members hosted the event at the Giessen campus. Overall organization was handled by Prof. Dr. Thomas Glotzbach, who has been supervising the MAMUT group at THM for almost five years.

Eurobot is an international event organized annually since 1998 by the French non-profit organization Planète Sciences. Participants from all over Germany traveled to the preliminary round to pit their self-built robots against each other. This year the theme was “Farming Mars”. Within 100 seconds, the robots had to collect artificial plants that were laid out on a three by two meter playing field and place them in defined end zones and turn solar cells in a specific direction. In the last ten seconds, some smaller robots also had to be moved from a starting zone to certain target points. No manual intervention was allowed during the entire game - the robots had to act autonomously. The successfully completed tasks were awarded points. The Mai Senior team from the Markt Indersdorf high school won. They have to prove themselves again in the final of the competition in La Roche-sur-Yon, France.

Between the rounds of the competition, the robots were tinkered with and programmemed until late into the night, and everyone could always rely on help from others. “We are competing against each other, but the real opponents are not the other teams, but the technical challenges in the field of robotics,” said Glotzbach, summing up the team spirit.