The Japanese domestic qualifying round for the sixth “Kibo Robot Programming Challenge” (Kibo-RPC), a competition run by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), was held on July 5, 2025, at the Tsukuba Space Center in Ibaraki Prefecture. The joint team “FUNABASHI” from Nagoya University and Tokyo University, led by Nagoya University School of Engineering student Riju Ishiwatari, won the competition. The team will go on to participate in the final round to be held in the fall, competing against representative teams from various countries and regions.
Kibo-RPC is an educational competition aimed at solving various problems by programing free-flying robots—Int-Ball and Astrobee—that were developed to support the activities of astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS). The programs were run on a simulator in the qualifying round, but will be run on actual robots inside the Japanese Experiment Module “Kibo” on the ISS in the final. The teams will be judged on the speed of mission completion and the accuracy of image recognition.
This article was originally published in Japanese and has been translated and edited for clarity and readability by the Nagoya University International Communications Office while preserving the original content’s intent. The original Japanese version is available here.