From world’s biggest competition to a global robotics community

This year has been all about organising Robotex International 2017 event in Tallinn and somewhat cleansing our reputation in the eyes of the public and various governmental organisations.

All so we could kickstart our growth in 2018!

That’s something every organisation and event will at some point face. You start with one goal in mind but will eventually outgrow it. Either because the world around you is rapidly changing or simply as more people become interested in what you do. In any case, unless you adapt to this new situation, you might one day wake up without the support of those once called true fans, while not having a concrete plan for the newcomers.

Probably something similar to this (kind of) happened to Robotex over the course of last 17 years as well.

When the event was first started by a few of the university professors, then the idea was simple: Give the students a chance for building something real and compete with others. Already then, there was another idea that all this is needed for helping Estonians across the country get more involved with robotics. And this was enough to excite everyone involved.

But this has started to change in the recent years. For one, the students have evermore options for putting their skills to practical use. All while there’s also a growing number of various types of robotics competitions happening globally, as well as nationally. Meanwhile, Estonia has seen a growth in various types of robotics companies being started around here – naming a few: Starship Technologies, Skeleton Technologies and Cleveron.

However, we’ve still been experiencing an increasing interest to attend the event in all age groups: from kindergarten and elementary school kids to university students and corporates/investors. Whereas this year we hosted people from over 35 countries, including the United States and Japan. Indicating that we’ve been doing something others may have managed to overlook. And not just others…

Need for a new vision.!?

Earlier this year, we finally understood that all this growth and various types of interest from all around the world means we need to rephrase our goal. Not because we couldn’t grow without one. Nor only because of us realising that we need it. But mostly as those, we could once call partners had started to doubt in us.

That’s when we understood that Robotex cannot just be about helping Estonian students get involved in robotics any longer. We had already become a global operation few years ago and now needed to act accordingly. But couldn’t forget our roots.

Thus, a new goal was born: Bring the global robotics ecosystem closer to each other, while giving them a meeting place – Estonia.

This way we’ll still keep Estonia in the middle of all this. But instead of just focusing on the state and the people living here, we’ll be building a safe-heaven for everyone involved in robotics ecosystem. And perhaps also help the world accelerate the technological advancements in this field. All while Silicon Valley has fallen into building just the software without giving us the robot helpers promised by the Jetsons.

And all parties we’ve wanted to be involved have already shown great support forthis new goal. From universities to the governmental organisations, while many corporates have also become excited – e.g. SONY and Arduino. However, a mere rephrasing won’t mean that everyone would jump back into the boat with you – for that they need some proof.

Becoming world’s biggest robotics festival in Tallinn

Our biggest goal for this year’s event was to break the Guinness World Record by hosting the biggest number of robots any competition had ever seen. And at least in terms of numbers, we did it!

We brought together over 20000 people and 1332 robots (built by 3195 engineers). Making it worthwhile to even host the first concert made just for robots.!?

The reason we wanted to do all this was both altruistic and selfish. On one side, we wanted to make a gift to the Estonian government as it’s becoming 100 years old. However, on the other side, we knew it would point many more international media outlets to write about us, as well as give us a bragging right when trying to convince biggest names to join our cause.

All so we could continue building the community that’s still globally non existent.

For better or worse, it generated enough buzz for us to have interested parties on almost all continents that want to start up Robotex pre-events in their countries. This includes Chile, Mexico, the U.S., Nigeria, Rwanda, Malaysia, Japan, Afghanistan, Iran, Latvia, Finland, Poland, Russia, Greece and Spain.

That should be enough for 2018–19.

What’s next?

Instead of taking a rest and losing the momentum we continued planning our next year just after Robotex International 2017. Thus, we’ve already got a few interesting ideas developing.

First up, next year’s Robotex International won’t just be limited to us hosting a family-friendly robotics festival at one venue. Instead, we’ll be taking over the whole Tallinn for a few days.

This means that in 2018 Robotex will host a week-long robotics festival together with various partners making sure that no one could miss the robots in the city. There will be the usual competition/expo, all while we add a few new treats. For example, we’ll be hosting a conference together with the Government bringing various international delegations consisting both politicians as well as top deep tech companies to Estonia. Meanwhile, we’re looking to host a roboethics debating competition, a midnight robot wars tournament and much more. Breath in and wait for the announcements sometime in late January!

However, Robotex is becoming an organisation hosting all types of robotics related shows, thus we’ll also be starting with a few pop-up events, a summer school and various types of meetups. And that’s just in Estonia!

Globally we already know about Robotex Rwanda: Entrepreneurial Challenge in February, Robotex China pre-events across April and May, RoboRAVE International’s Robotex Sumo event in May, Robotex Cyprus in June, Robotex China regional event in August and Robotex Greece in October + many more that are still in the discussion phase.

So we’ve got a busy year ahead of us and everyone’s welcome to join this cause – just contact us and let’s see how we could help each other.!?