Last weekend in Louisville, Kentucky, USA, VEX Worlds broke the record for the Largest robot competition after a total of 1,075 teams from 30 different nations participated in the huge robotics tournament.
The teams gathered at the venue to compete for three days in the world championship which saw 15,000 primary-university level students taking part in various challenges.
Aiming to celebrate the accomplishments of the top robotics teams from around the world, the competition, presented by the Robotics Education & Competition (REC) Foundation and the Northrop Grumman Foundation, featured teams from Canada, China, Puerto Rico, and the United States of America.
Jason Morrella, President of the REC Foundation said: “It’s been a record-breaking year all around for the REC Foundation. Not only does VEX Worlds now hold the record for the largest robotics competition ever held, but this year our program exceeded over 16,000 teams participating in over 1,300 competition events. We look forward to building on this momentum and providing more students and teachers access to high-quality, affordable, and sustainable programs like the VEX IQ Challenge, VEX Robotics Competition, and VEX U.”
VEX Worlds is comprised of the top performing 1,100 robotics teams (out of 16,000 teams) who qualified in one of the following five program divisions: VEX IQ Challenge Elementary School World Championship (ages 8-10), VEX IQ Challenge Middle School World Championship (ages 11-14), VEX Robotics Competition Middle School World Championship (ages 11-14), VEX Robotics Competition High School World Championship (ages 14-18) and VEX U(ages 18+).
The record was previously held by the 2005 RoboGames, held in San Francisco State University in California (USA) which featured a total of 646 engineers, 466 robots and 13 countries. Events included soccer with reprogrammed Aibo robot dogs, robo-sumo wrestling, bipedal racing, fire fighting and musical artistry.