A group of Australian students will soon compete at the world’s richest robotics competition.

A team from the University of New South Wales is the only Australian team to qualify for the US$5 million Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Competition.

The team of five robots and 10 engineers leaves this weekend to do battle against 24 teams from 11 countries.

“The focus of the competition is disaster response, to push robotics with an ambitious and technologically demanding set of challenges,” said Mark Whitty, a mechatronics engineer and leader of the UNSW team.

“Take the Fukushima disaster, when the Japanese reactor went into meltdown. The robots they tried to place in there were unable to do things like walk up a set of stairs, unscrew nuts and bolts – basically, incapable of doing anything useful.”

The UNSW team’s robots consist of one unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) and four autonomous hexacopter drones – Flippy, Floppy, Flappy and Fally – developed by the seven students, aged 20 to 26 (three of whom are graduate students now working at Uber, Microsoft and Google), plus three UNSW researchers.

“Our robot drones are going to be put to the test, identifying objects from the air, landing on moving vehicles to pick up those objects, then delivering them to a target site,” said project leader Stanley Lam, a UNSW research associate and recent postgraduate student.

“There’s also a ground vehicle component, where the UGV has to drive to a panel in a location, identify and pick up a certain size spanner, grip it, and use it to turn a valve stem – all of this without human intervention – to demonstrate dexterity and mobility of an autonomous mobile platform,” he added.

The inaugural Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Competition (MBZIRC) is being held in Abu Dhabi 16-18 March 2017. It is to be held every two years, with a US$5 million prize pool.