What is a good FI project?

Future Innovators is still a young category in Switzerland. For some teams and coaches, this leads to the question: What is a really good project that has a chance of success?

The following tips can help you choose a suitable topic. They are not intended to intimidate you, but to help you check your idea for potential success.

This video from the 2022 WRO World Final in Germany can give you some ideas for great projects (Sorry, this video is in German). But don't be intimidated by the size of these projects. The teams shown in this film also started out with a simple robotics set!

You will be working on your project for several months. Some teams spend part of their free time on it, especially in the last few weeks, even if it started as a school project. If you're not having fun with the project, that's a very long time! It is helpful if you choose a project topic that is important to you in some way. If you have an idea of how this project could be helpful for yourself or for people you care about, that is a great motivation to keep at it for so long. Or if the robot helps with a social or ecological problem that you are also interested in, it is easier to develop good ideas.

All the topics that come to your mind in the first 10 minutes are probably the first things that come to the minds of every other team in the world. This means that if you choose such a project, you will have a lot of competition from other teams showing the same thing. In this case, you have to fulfill all the criteria of the competition extremely well to have a chance. That is very difficult. It is better to spend a little more time searching for your project. A coach from Germany, whose teams have been qualifying for the German finals and international competitions for years, advised the following:

"When I start the WRO season with my robotics class, we have a brainstorming session. The students have 15 minutes to write down everything they can think of relating to the theme for the year. This is collected on the board and noted. But then all these ideas are discarded. After all, these are the everyday topics that everyone else can think of. We then do a second brainstorming session for the rest of the lesson and as homework for the next week, and the ideas that grow in that time are much better."

The task for Future Innovators is always very broad. In 2022, the motto was "My Robot – My Friend". The task was to develop a robot or robotic solution that is suitable for one of the three activities:

• Help in the household
• Recovery and rescue
• Assistance in (nursing) care

Robots are already being used in all three areas. And all three areas are broad enough that there's a good chance you'll have a truly original project that not too many other teams have (if you follow tip 1). A vacuum cleaner robot, a laundry-ironing robot, a flower-watering robot and a dishwasher-cleaning robot would all do the job. On the other hand, a robot that looks for the right pieces from the box for the children when they are playing Lego would certainly be a great friend, but it doesn't really help around the house. Therefore, this robot would get fewer points because the task is not well fulfilled (even if it is otherwise a great project).

If you take a project where you have to expect that many other teams will have something similar, then think about it: What can we do with our project that is really special? In the example of the household robot, there were many projects that had a similar basic idea to a Roomba. The floor is cleaned with a robot. This was implemented to varying degrees by the teams, but basically most of these projects were boring as they contained nothing new. But if your robot vacuum cleaner could not only remove dirt from the floor, but could also identify coins as "This is not waste", for example, then it would have significant innovative added value compared to the normal Roomba.

You can have great ideas for your projects. Why should your robot friend only give your pet food at the touch of a button? Automatic feeders are already available in all sizes. Why not think about whether the robot that helps you with your pet could also play with it? Or could clean the litter box? Would your robot be able to stand in for you during short vacations so that you don't have to hire a pet sitter?

But always remember two points:

• You have to build a working prototype that you can present at the competition. It should show everything you have planned. The more diverse or complicated functions you have, the more time-consuming the material and programming will be. Think about what you can realistically achieve in the time available to you and with the materials (or budget) you have. A robot that doesn't deliver what the team promises has no chance of a good ranking!
• You must have an idea of the realization of your project in the real world. This means: Is it possible to build a robot that goes for a walk with the dog, that is strong enough that the dog cannot simply pull it over and drag it along when it wants to run away, but that is also fast enough to allow the dog real movement? He should of course also be able to pick up the dog poo and dispose of it correctly, and prevent the dog from doing its business in the neighbor's strawberry patch of all places. And it should be able to do all this in wind and weather and sub-zero temperatures without damaging the electronics or mechanics, and also find its way home again safely. What kind of material would such a robot have to be made of? (Your prototype may be made of Lego, but in the real world it wouldn't be a good idea…) What would such a device cost for the end customer? Would it even be marketable? The older the teams are, the more important such questions are when evaluating the project.