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Graduate students of the School Engineering of Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) trained the industrial robot to control a mathematical pendulum and to recognize human commands. The software, created in the MATLAB/Simulink design environment, gave a win to the students in the Simulink Student Challenge 2017 international competition. The FEFU team was the first in the world to win two consecutive MathWorks competitions.

The group of graduate students of the FEFU Department of Industrial Production Technologies worked on the project: Ilya Baranchugov, Arseniy Kaganovich, Eugene Mirgorodsky, Yuri Nikolaev, Denis Plotnikov, Kirill Podberezin, Oleg Snegirev, and Eugene Shkurin. The academic advisor is Boris Notkin, the Assistant Professor, FEFU School of Engineering.

"Industrial robots are getting closer and closer to humans in modern automated production. For the technical means while performing particularly complex and responsible operations to interact with the human being on an equal footing and even to replace her/him, the robot must acquire the skills previously inherent only to intelligent beings," Boris Notkin explained the essence of the task.

In total, 25 teams from all over the world took part in the competition. According to the jury—MathWorks developers—Russian students showed the highest creativity and skills in using system modeling tools. The FEFU graduate students trained a serial industrial robot to see the commands of the human operator and to feel the forces arising at the point of suspension of the pendulum placed on the manipulator. The students used the principles of predictive control in the development, as well as analytics of artificial neural networks, computer vision technologies, and computational capabilities of MATLAB/Simulink.

The results of the work were presented by the students in the Industrial Robot Control Using MATLAB and Simulink video. It is noteworthy that after submitting the application for the competition, the team did not stop working on the project and produced another video in which they demonstrated the advanced management of an industrial robot with the help of Augmented Reality technologies.

It should be noted that the students of Far Eastern Federal University were the first in the world to win two consecutive MathWorks competitions. In the summer of 2017, the FEFU team won the Mobile Devices Challenge with the MATLAB Mobile Floor Racing project. The students created the Floor Racing mobile application, which allows using a projector and several smartphones to turn any surface into an exciting racing track.