Feature: Spirit runs high as Chinese youth team prepares for robotic championship

It was a scene of wonderful chaos at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. Clang and clamor filled its enormous exhibition hall, along with buzzing power tools, humming 3D printers and spinning motors, as young competitors geared up for the 2016 FIRST Robotics Competition.

The three-day international high school robotics competition, which kicked off on Friday, has attracted over 200 competing teams from the United States and foreign countries including Brazil, Britain, China, Ecuador, the Netherlands and Turkey.

Among them was "Blue Power", the only team that comes from China, whose 16 members are all students from High School affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University, one of China's leading institution in the field of robotic engineering.

"The competition is crazily cool," said Zhu Yijie, a veteran member of the team, who was excited about the upcoming face-off with other teams. "The game we are going to play is just like fighting in a real battle. I'm so hyped!"

This year's game requires competing robots to play the "Stronghold," a game that asks opposing sides to embark on a "Quest" in a football pitch-like field to breach their opponents' fortifications, weaken their tower with boulders, and capture the opposing tower.

Robots score points by breaching opponents' defense and scoring boulders through goals in the opposing tower. During the final 20 seconds of the Quest, robots may surround and scale the opposing tower to capture it.

"It's a lot better than last year's game," said Charlotte Kavaler, team member of Fe Maidens from New York's Bronx High School of Science, who compared the 2015 game as almost box stacking.

Kavaler gave credits to the designer of the 2016 event and expected more uses of strategy in the upcoming competition.

But the well-designed game also posed greater challenge for the young robot enthusiasts.

"It's a lot harder to design the robot," said Zhu, "The robot has to be able to perform more different movements in this year's game."

The added movements will create more shakes and vibrations for the robot, which in turn would put an amount of strain on its structural integrity.

To help the robotic player better locate the goal when throwing the boulder, the team added video cameras on the robot.

"We gave it an eye," said Zhu, "It's like playing basketball. You have to be precise to score the goal."

Last year, Zhu and his three other teammates entered the global championship and eventually brought back the "Rookie All-star" Award. Since the competition organizer FIRST announced the 2016 game format in January, the team have been working on their robot as the players eyed something bigger this year.

"Our goal is to win this regional competition, and proceed into the Global Championship," said Tao Chaoqun, also a Blue Power team member.

Despite being busy with preparation for the game, they still managed to keep a close eye on the historic man-machine showdown between Google's supercomputer program AlphaGo and Go-chess grand master Lee Sedol.

"We ourselves are still far from being able to program and create Artificial Intelligence (AI) like the AlphaGo, but we see the bright future when AI and robots finally integrates with each other," said Zhu.

"I believe robots with AI will become human's good friends," he added. Endi