19 September 2016

On September 16-18, RoboFest Belarus festival was held in Minsk.

The festival was organized by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus, the HTP Educational Center, the Minsk Palace for Children and Youth, and the Republican Center of Innovative and Technical Creativity. The event was sponsored by the HTP resident-companies Adform and Game Stream.

Minister of Education Mikhail Zhuravkov welcomed RoboFest participants: "Such an event is held in Belarus for the first time. Some school students' developments are astonishingly impressive and interesting to adults for their further application. We know examples when projects from such exhibitions turned into successful businesses."

The festival provided the opportunity for participants to communicate with world-known experts in robotics, innovation, and information technologies, and see latest technologies developed by Belarusian young scientists and entrepreneurs who launched successful startups in the sphere of robotics and IT.

Among multiple interesting projects, there were socially important ones. Pavel Bulanov and his team has been engaged in robotics for eighteen months already and managed to create an exoskeleton for people with mobility disorders. According to Pavel, there are no prototypes in Belarus: "We presented a small prototype of the exoskeleton at the exhibition. It is very convenient and light. We will work on its mechanism and hopefully improve it so that it could improve lives of people with mobility disorders.

"We have organized such a large-scale festival in robotics for the first time. We wanted to make it unusual and remarkable. The main feature of the festival is that all the participants can put themselves in young engineers' shoes. Students had the opportunity to take part in competitions, develop their own projects, and communicate with like-minded people," commented Head of the HTP Educational Center Vadim Zelenkov.

During the 3 days of the festival, RoboFest participants could attend science seminars, discussions, master classes, and different competitions, such as a drone contest, RoboRace and Code Wheels. Teams from all regions of Belarus and two Russian cities (Kazan and Saint Petersburg) participated. All the winners received prizes and awards.