China's team wins runner-up in 2019 Microsoft Innovation Cup Asian Finals

On Feb 12, the 2019 Microsoft Innovation Cup Asian Finals was held in Sydney, Australia. A total of 12 teams from 10 countries in Asia competed against each other in the competition.

China's finals champion team RailinNovawon runner-up in the Asian regional finals with its project, Railway Operation Maintenance and Inspection Robot.

The RailinNova team wins runner-up in the 2019 Microsoft Innovation Cup Asian Finals. From left to right: Shi Kejian, Liu Zhenyu, and Wangnan.[Photo/gznsnews.com.cn]

Microsoft's Innovation Cup is the largest student science and technology competition in the world. This year, it was held in Guangdong province for the first time and is exclusively hosted by the Unicorn Ranch（a technology incubation platform）.

The 2019 Microsoft Innovation Cup was officially launched in November 2018. The Guangdong Regional Contest set up four cities (Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Zhaoqing) in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area as regional competition sites.

The contest attracts nearly 100 projects from more than 20 universities across the province, covering the fields of transportation, energy, education, medicine, environmental protection and others.

Wang Nan, the RailinNova team project leader, said that the subway maintenance robot can realize the track de-artificial detection through automatic positioning and navigation, image processing and recognition of faults, big data construction to solve the health threat and personal safety threat, false or missed detection, high cost and high work intensity brought by manual detection.

"At present, detection work of more than 4 million parts of the Shenzhen Metro is mainly based on workers walking in the tunnel at one to fouro'clock in the morning. The recognition time of a single rail defect algorithm of maintenance inspection robot is only 0.02 seconds and its accuracy is higher than 97.8 percent. From the concept of invention, hardware and software, to algorithms, they are all completed by our team", Wang Nan said.

“The cloud technology, big data, robotics and artificial intelligence are the four technological hot points that have spawned countless entrepreneurial projects. However, the RailinNova team's robot has shown very strong usability", well-known technology media iFaner commented on RailinNova.

The contest not only provides a platform for outstanding innovation projects to the national and even the world's scientific and technological innovation display stage, but also enables the innovative and dynamic student innovation project to enter the market. It effectively supports the transformation of production, education and research.

The 2018 Microsoft Innovation Cup Guangzhou Regional Champion, the second prize of the China Finals 98k squad set up a company after the game, completed the process from "innovation" to“entrepreneurship".