 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. This is the world's biggest, most complex, and completely over the top student robotics competition. Over five days, students from 200 universities around China compete in front of tens of thousands of fans while millions more watch online. The whole thing takes place inside this colossal stadium in Shenzhen, an arena that usually hosts the country's biggest rock stars. It's all being funded by Daicheng Innovation Science and Technology Company. You probably know them as DJI, or at least you know their flagship product, the now iconic Phantom Drone. The students are competing not only for cash prizes, but a chance to audition their talents for jobs at DJI. DJI, on the other hand, wants to use this competition to become the most successful robotics company in the world. This is RoboMasters. This competition is like a battle between robots. We make some robots to fight against each other. Each match pits two teams of robots against each other. The units maneuver around the field, collecting power-ups and ammunition, ideally without tipping over. The goal is to reach the opposing team's base station. The robots can shoot at each other with cannons, aiming for small, pressure-sensitive plates. Enough hits on those plates, and the bot automatically shuts off. The teams can also successfully deplete the enemy base station of all its health and win a sudden death. So each team will build their own robots, and the robots mainly consist of three systems. So the first one will be the driving system, which has four wheels, which enables the car to move around. The second part will be the weapon system. And the last part is actually the judging system provided by the organizer, the competition DJI. The judging system consists of different components. The sensors to detect coming damage, that's one part. And the sensors for monitoring speed is another part. And we also have another cameras. So the view of the camera will be transmitted back to the operation room, where the operators will only use this first-person view to move their robot. Every team has eight robots, including four infantry, a hero, a drone, and a base, and also a station that can provide bullets, like a recharging station. So this one is infantry. It has a cannon, and it can shoot bullets. Bullets coming from here, and it can shoot out there. The small infantry robots can only fire little rubber pellets, while the drone and the hero can use golf balls, doing much more damage with every strike. Golf balls are tough to get, and that's on purpose. Teams have to design a mechanical system for collecting and launching them efficiently. Teams that were reliably able to get the golf balls were consistently able to take out the enemy and win the match. Some teams created smaller, faster hero robots and relied on their drones to collect golf balls, using the aircraft to arm their hero or bomb the enemy base. Others built large hero robots that could scale a central island, climbing over a sea of spikes. Teams developed a wide variety of mechanical solutions, everything from arms and vacuums to wheels on stilts. The mechanical engineering that went into the tournament was always a big hit with the crowd, but the really high-tech stuff was actually happening out of sight in the software. We forced students to design base robots as fully autonomous. So the base robot can shoot 17-millimeter plastic balls as well, but it had to do it automatically. In this way, we encouraged students to involve those high technologies. The high technology he's referring to is something called computer vision. It's the same kind of tech that lets self-driving cars navigate roads. Computers must be able to scan incoming visual data, recognize what it sees, and then perform actions based off that information. So for an autonomous vehicle, if it comes to a stop sign, it knows to stop. At RoboMasters, computer vision was used to enable an autonomous base, allowing it to identify the enemy and return fire without human help. I think the vision is really the key to enable new applications of robots. So that's why we want to integrate this kind of technology into our robotic competitions. That's Frank Wang. He's the CEO of DJI and the mastermind behind this competition. And the big feature of their latest drones? You guessed it, computer vision. The Phantom 4 can see the world around it and autonomously avoid crashes. That drone, and DJI's new handheld camera stabilizer, can also identify and automatically track subjects, keeping them in frame even if you're not moving a muscle. But Frank sees this technology as the future for much more than drones. We will first use the vision in the drone itself, but later we can expand to other applications, like maybe sometimes autonomous driving, sometimes agriculture, autonomous cherry picking, these kind of things, lots of human, very labor intensive things, and can be replaced by chip and vision enabled robots. Over the last three years, DJI has emerged from obscurity to dominate the booming market for consumer drones. But if it wants to make the jump beyond quadcopters to driverless cars and farming robots, it's going to need to compete against much larger companies. The students at RoboMasters are hoping to score jobs at DJI. For the company, the stakes are reversed. It's battling with much larger tech titans to win top talent in some of technology's hottest fields, computer vision and autonomous navigation. The 200 universities competing in RoboMasters were, in effect, training their students to work with DJI products, and they were bringing these passionate students right to DJI's doorstep. That's the logical explanation anyway, the one a public company would give if its investors raised a stink about the cost of putting on a big, fancy, over the top tournament. And for RoboMasters creator, the real goal is about sharing his passion for robotics with the new generation. Lots of people can become famous, like a sports star. I do not think other than entertain people, they do not create too much of it. But I think if we can put engineering and entertainment together, not only they can entertain, they can educate lots of people. Even if they are not becoming superstar, they are very good engineer. They are very good innovator. Maybe some of them become entrepreneurs. We just have to make something exciting for people to watch. We are trying to let robot competition and robot engineers be noticed by general public. Because usually robotics engineers, they only work in labs and they build very, they do rocket science, but the general public cannot appreciate what they are doing. You could see the way the tournament was designed to make stars out of nerdy teenagers. The competition featured live feeds of them operating their robots, documentary films on their preparations, and even an anime series that turned contestants into action heroes. RoboMasters made these students larger than life. I was pushed in front of the spotlight and I was right in the center. The first time I see the poster, I was also a bit shocked. It's amazing to me. I believe it's amazing to a lot of other people also, especially young children. If they see this kind of thing, they must be like, wow, I'm going to do something like this when I grow up. I really encourage more girls to try it. Could RoboMasters ever be as popular as a mainstream sport? Will kids one day aspire to be engineers the way they aspire to be rock stars? That remains to be seen. But in the final moments of the competition, when the champions successfully used their hero robot and its golf ball cannon to take down the opposing base station and the crowd went wild, it sure felt like a roaring success.