Vietnamese students at the 2017 ABU Asia-Pacific Robot Contest (Robocon 2017) in Japan were crowned champions on Sunday after trumping their Malaysian opponents in the event’s finale.

Launched in 2002 by the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU), ‘Robocon’ is an international stage for engineering students from the Asia-Pacific region to showcase their skills in robotics.

The contest often involves head-to-head matches where the robots are tasked with achieving specific goals to score points and win.

This year, 19 teams of university undergraduates from countries and territories across the Asia-Pacific region gathered in the Japanese capital of Tokyo on Sunday to compete for the title.

Students from Lac Hong University in southern Dong Nai Province represented Vietnam at the contest, after winning the national round in May.

The Vietnamese team bagged easy wins against Fiji and Sri Lanka in the group stage, before trumping India and Japan in the quarter-final and semi-final, respectively.

Facing off against Malaysia in the night’s finale, the Vietnamese student team executed cohesive teamwork to win the match after only one minute and 20 seconds.

Vietnam is set to host next year’s Robocon, where the host country will task contestants with building robots capable of playing the traditional game of ‘nem con’ popular among ethnic communities in northwestern parts of the Southeast Asian country.

The simple game involves throwing a cloth-wrapped ball through a hoop dozens of meters above the ground.

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