Last three years LARICS students were developing different bio-inspired robots. The main driving force is our wish to develop a four-legged robot that will be able to walk, trot, pace, bound, run and jump carrying a robotic rider on its back whose mission is to hit a small round target “alka” with the tip of a spear held in his hand. The inspiration for that effort comes from the legendary Croatian knight’s tournament “Sinjska alka” held every year since 1715 on the first Sunday in August in the picturesque Dalmatian town Sinj, which is situated very close to the second-largest Croatian city Split. This tournament with such a long tradition was recognized by UNESCO as the heritage of world culture.
The idea to organize the robotic tournament in the year 2015 in the honor of the 300th anniversary of “Sinjska alka” was born in the Croatian Society for Robotics, with the clear motive to popularize robotics among scholars and students and to join rich cultural heritage of Croatia with the state-of-the-art technology. So far, our students have designed several robots “alkars”, which they presented in public, and they got a lot of attention from different media. For example, Croatian national television visited our lab and made a story about our student’s robots (see video).