MBZIRC

The Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) is an international robotics competition held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, every two years.

The competition aims to attract high-caliber talent from all across the world to compete to solve an ongoing problem. This year the theme involved a heterogeneous collaboration among unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned surface vehicles to perform complex navigation and manipulation tasks in a GNSS-denied environment.

At GTECH, we were tasked with creating a comprehensive product that was split into 3 sections

• – Microsite
• – Registration portal and Community forum
• – Submission portal

Microsite:

The microsite was designed and developed to ensure key information, latest news, and updates were easily accessible. The microsite had a dedicated section to elaborate on the process and deadlines involved for teams that wished to participate. This website was built in Drupal 9 which has the following advantages

• – Faster and better performance
• – Multilingual capabilities
• – Allows to define content workflow
• – Headless CMS

Registration Portal:

To participate, teams had to register themselves through a registration form that would send out automated emails that provided access to the following sections 

• – Community Forum – Teams were sent private invites to be part of the Discourse community forum. This forum served as a communication tool between the participants and the organizers which is a change from the traditional chat or email route
• – Submission portal – Teams had access to submit their whitepaper submissions via a portal.

Submissions portal:

The organizers had access to the portal which had the following features

• – Portal access based on the user role type
• – List view of all the submissions
• – Information on the teams registered and submitted
• – Export list of teams and their details
• – Export white paper submissions
• – Enable and disable the registration form and submission links.

GTECH successfully delivered a custom-built microsite for the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge which included a full fledged registration and submission portal and a community forum.

The organizers used the portal to review teams and their members as well as review and shortlist qualified whitepapers.