The HKUST Robotics Team and Robocon: A Student Team History from the ABU Contest Arena to the Birth of DJI

In a sentence: The HKUST Robotics Team, which has competed since 2004 and expanded in 2010, has amassed 11 championships in the Robocon Hong Kong Contest and twice placed as first runner-up at the ABU Robocon international competition (2015, 2020). Under the mentorship of Li Zexiang, its story weaves indirectly into the founding of DJI.

A helicopter flight-controller project that crashed during its graduation defence and earned only a C—and a student team that dominated the Hong Kong Contest for five consecutive years—seem like worlds apart. Yet they point to the same laboratory, the same cohort of young people debugging robots through the night. HKUST lacks the colonial-era "Big Two" sports grudges that HKU and CUHK share; its most nationally recognisable competitive calling card is the robotics workshop tucked at the end of an engineering corridor, its lights on into the small hours. This piece does not rehash the athletic landscape already covered in our HKUST Representative Teams, Intervarsity Contests & Robotics Team Overview. Instead, it trains the lens exclusively on the team itself: how it is organised, how it selects members, what it has won, and the thread connecting it to DJI—a thread often retold, and frequently retold wrongly.

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# What Kind of Team Is the HKUST Robotics Team?

The HKUST Robotics Team is not a team for a single competition, but the umbrella name for a student technical organisation. According to its official website^※, it comprises four sub-teams, each aligned with an international or national contest: the Robocon Team (for the Robocon Hong Kong Contest / ABU Asia-Pacific Robot Contest), the MATE ROV underwater remotely operated vehicle team, the Intelligent Racing Team (for the National University Students Intelligent Car Race), and the UAV drone team. These four fronts span land, sea, air, and autonomous driving; the Robocon Team is the longest-standing and most decorated among them.

Beyond the vertical division by competition, the team is horizontally split into three functional departments. According to the official website^※, the Mechanical department handles structural design, fabrication, and actuator integration; the Hardware department manages microcontrollers, PCB design, and sensor wiring; the Software department is responsible for algorithms, control systems, and computer vision. A competition robot, from blueprint to the field, is a product of collaboration across these three pipelines—and this matrix structure of "sub-teams × departments" is the organisational foundation that allows the team to fight on four competitive fronts simultaneously.

The team's official record dates back to 2004. According to the School of Engineering's "Dream Team Hub" page, the Robotics Team was founded in 2004^※, originally as a single Robocon team formed to compete in the Hong Kong Contest. In 2010^※, to extend the benefits of hands-on learning to more students, the Robocon team was expanded into the present-day Robotics Team structure. The same official page states that, as of its compilation, the team has accumulated over 160 awards^※ at local, national, and international levels since 2004 (note: this is the total claimed by an official source; individual awards are not itemised by date).

One detail merits particular note: where its members come from. The official website and School of Engineering page indicate that members are not limited to the School of Engineering; they come from the School of Engineering, School of Science, School of Business and Management, and the Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies^※, among other faculties. A team named for robotics competitions has business and science students on its roster—a point that will resurface when we discuss the team's recruitment philosophy.

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# A Chronology of Results: How Many Times Has HKUST Won the Hong Kong Contest?

The Robocon Hong Kong Contest was first held in 2004. Each year's theme is a localised adaptation of that year's ABU Robocon international challenge; the champion represents Hong Kong at the international contest. According to a School of Engineering announcement, the Fiery Dragon team^※ secured in 2018 what was HKUST's ninth local championship since 2004. According to another announcement, the War Dragon team^※ took the tenth in 2020 (as of that point).

Drawing on the Chinese Wikipedia's compilation of historical results, HKUST's 11 Hong Kong Contest championships are distributed as follows (scope: local contest championships only, including a shared championship with CUHK in 2021):

The most striking stretch of this chronology is the five consecutive championships from 2011 to 2015. According to a School of Engineering announcement, HKUST's 2015 win marked its fifth successive local championship^※ (spanning 2011–2015). During this period, HKUST virtually monopolised the right to represent Hong Kong at the ABU Robocon—a fact that directly underpinned its two subsequent appearances in the international finals.

Before the five-year streak, there were two early trophies often passed over in silence. The Chinese Wikipedia's compilation records that HKUST's first local championship came in the 2005 "Climbing the Great Wall, Lighting the Torch" contest^※—a year when the ABU Robocon was held in Beijing, themed around scaling the Great Wall to ignite a flame, and HKUST travelled north as Hong Kong's champion. Three years later, in the 2008 "Govinda" contest^※ themed on stacking human pyramids, HKUST again won the local title and competed at the international contest in Pune, India. These two early championships push the history of HKUST's robotics competition back to just over a decade after the university's founding, and make the five-year run that began in 2011 feel less like something out of nowhere—it was a burst along a curve that had been building momentum for six or seven years.

Nestled between those two early wins is a "one step short" footnote. According to the same source, in the 2010 contest—"Miraculous Strategy, Building Pyramids with Ingenuity"—the local title went to the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (IVE); HKUST settled for first runner-up^※. It is intriguing that this was the very year the HKUST Robotics Team expanded, transforming from a single Robocon team into the multi-front organisation it is today—a local defeat and an organisational expansion fell in the same year.

2016 was a turning point on this curve: CUHK, as a dark horse, won its first local championship and went on to win the international contest held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, becoming the first Hong Kong team ever to be crowned world champions^※. Since then, local hegemony has changed hands several times between HKUST and CUHK; from 2022, CUHK embarked on its own streak of dominance, and the 2025 and 2026 titles returned to HKU. Viewed in the context of this long arc, HKUST's unique place is not defined by any single year's win, but by being the team that first wrote the word "dynasty" into the history of Hong Kong's inter-varsity robotics contests.

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# Twice ABU Robocon First Runner-Up: How Far Has HKUST Reached Internationally?

The local contest is merely an entry ticket; the true ceiling is the ABU Asia-Pacific Robot Contest (ABU Robocon)—an annual event assembling teams from Japan, China, Vietnam, India, and other nations across Asia-Pacific and Oceania. HKUST's two finishes as international first runner-up are among the best results ever achieved by a Hong Kong team in this competition.

The first was in 2015. According to a School of Engineering announcement, that year's ABU theme was "Robominton"^※ (doubles badminton, with each team fielding a wireless and a wired robot), and HKUST, representing Hong Kong in Indonesia, captured the first runner-up position—a result the announcement explicitly called "HKUST's best result ever." The two faculty advisors for that edition were Tim Woo (then Director of the Global and Community Engagement Office) and Shaojie Shen of the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering.

The second was in 2020, a season wholly rewritten by the pandemic. The School of Engineering announcement records that the 2020 ABU theme was "ROBO Rugby 7s"^※ (two robots collaborating to pick up, pass, receive, and kick a rugby ball). Moved online due to COVID-19, the event was held on 12 December 2020^※, with 21 winning teams from 11 Asia-Pacific regions taking part. The War Dragon team secured not only the international first runner-up title, but also the Best Presentation Award and a special prize from sponsor Nagase, recognising the robot's agility.

The 2020 campaign also carries a technical footnote. According to the same announcement, this was the first time HKUST deployed in competition an independent steering-drive system it had been developing in-house since 2018^※—a chassis technology that took more than two years to move from concept to the arena. Behind a student team's international ranking is often precisely this kind of technical accumulation measured in years, rather than the on-the-day performance of a single tournament.

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# "War Dragon" and "Fiery Dragon": How a Student Team Recruits and Trains

When competing, the HKUST Robotics Team often fields two parallel sub-teams, bearing names with a certain martial flair: War Dragon and Fiery Dragon. According to the School of Engineering, the team that won the ninth local title in 2018 was Fiery Dragon^※, whose members were predominantly first- and second-year students; the War Dragon team that surged to an international runner-up finish in 2020 comprised, according to another announcement, a combined total of 29 interdisciplinary undergraduates^※ across the two sub-teams, including nine non-local students from India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam. That a Hong Kong student team fields international faces for nearly a third of its squad is, against the backdrop of HKUST's international character, hardly surprising.

On recruitment, the team has its own philosophy. According to the official website, new members undergo interviews, an internal training programme, and a final "Robot Design Contest" before being assigned to their roles. What is revealing is the openly stated selection criterion—the official line is that "passion is more highly regarded than pure skill," and the team expressly welcomes students from any background, including the Business School and the School of Science, not just engineering majors. This explains why a robotics team's roster includes business students: it recruits people willing to spend all night in the workshop, not people who arrive fully formed as experts.

The training rhythm is tightly bound to the annual contest cycle. The 2018 announcement notes that the team typically invests about six months^※ of preparation from design to completion for a single competition robot; that year's local contest saw 12 teams from six tertiary institutions compete head-to-head. Six months to hone a machine, seconds to decide the winner on the day—in 2018, Fiery Dragon clinched the title by completing the "Rong Bay" challenge in 53 seconds flat. This rhythm of long preparation and short, sharp showdowns is the key to understanding the team's training culture.

The "Robot Design Contest" selection hurdle is itself a miniature season. According to the official website, newcomers are not admitted immediately upon passing an interview; they must first complete internal training modules, then apply what they have learned to build something functional in a self-run design competition—using a small contest to filter out those who can truly stick with it. This process turns "passion over pure skill" from a slogan into a mechanism: it tests not a person's ability at the point of entry, but their willingness to tear down and rebuild a robot again and again. For a team fighting across land, sea, air, and autonomous driving, sustained commitment is rarer than a moment of cleverness.

The team's outward-facing motto is straightforward. The official website boils its mission down to "Unleash Your Potential with HKUST Robotics Team"^※. It is also a youth-development project: according to the School of Engineering page, the team has, since 2013^※, continuously run community projects, including workshops for underprivileged students and those with special educational needs—extending "building robots with your own hands" from competition into public education.

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# From Robocon to DJI: The Thread Involving Frank Wang and Li Zexiang

The most frequently cited piece of lore about this team is its connection to DJI. To tell this thread properly, one must distinguish what is historical fact from what is a convenient narrative grafted on later.

Let us start with Frank Wang's own trajectory at HKUST. According to the HKUST Alumni page, Frank Wang (Wang Tao; 汪滔) earned both his Bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering and a Master of Philosophy in Electronic and Computer Engineering^※ from the university. The English Wikipedia notes that after being rejected by MIT and Stanford, he enrolled at HKUST. Looking back, he traced his starting point to a single course: he is officially quoted as saying, "At HKUST I took an electronics course that gave me the fundamental knowledge to build autonomously controlled flying machines."

What truly drew attention was a final-year group project. Forbes has reported that Frank Wang poured himself into building a flight-control system for a model helicopter, "skipping classes and working until 5 a.m."^※ on it. Although the prototype's hovering function failed during its demonstration, the leadership and commitment he displayed caught the eye of robotics professor Li Zexiang (Zexiang Li). According to the same report, Li Zexiang did not judge students solely by grades—his reasoning being that "good performance [at work] was not necessarily comparable with good grades"—and brought this academically unremarkable student into his postgraduate programme, later becoming an early advisor to and investor in DJI.

Now to the Robocon chapter. Both the English Wikipedia and the Forbes report state that in 2005, Frank Wang competed on the HKUST team at the ABU Robocon, winning third place among Asian teams^※ (corresponding to the international contest held in Beijing that year, themed "Climbing the Great Wall, Lighting the Torch"). Afterwards, the university granted him and two classmates HK$18,000 (approximately US$2,300)^※ for drone research and development. This small grant is the first pot of "money from the university" repeatedly invoked in the DJI origin story.

What truly incubated DJI was a graduation project, not a competition trophy. Forbes reports that Frank Wang's final-year project was to build a usable flight-control system for a model helicopter; the prototype crashed during his defence and he received only a C grade^※. But he and his team did not stop. In 2006, with residual scholarship funds and family support, he founded DJI^※, initially tinkering with prototypes in an HKUST dormitory before relocating to Shenzhen the same year.

DJI's earliest form was far more frugal than the phrase "drone empire" suggests. According to Forbes, after moving to Shenzhen with two HKUST classmates, Frank Wang rented a three-bedroom apartment^※ and kept things running on the remainder of his university scholarship; the earliest revenues came from selling flight-controller units—costing around US$6,000 each—to mainland Chinese universities and state-owned power companies. This makeshift setup was far from stable. According to the same report, within the first two years, nearly all the original partners had left. Years later, teacher and student jointly received the 2019 IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Field Award^※ (shared by Frank Wang and Li Zexiang), placing an academic seal on this origin point. According to Forbes, as DJI chairman, Li Zexiang ultimately held roughly a 10% stake.

So the statement "DJI was incubated out of the HKUST Robotics Team" is more accurately rendered as: Frank Wang was an HKUST Robocon competitor and a postgraduate student under Li Zexiang; Robocon and that small grant were the fuse, but the thing that actually ignited was the flight-control research during his MPhil studies and that crashing graduation project. To equate DJI directly with "a product of the Robotics Team" compresses the story of "the same people, the same laboratory" too far—a distinction this piece is at pains to draw, which is the boundary we demarcate against the entrepreneurship incubation entry elsewhere on this site.

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# One Professor, One Industry Chain: Why Does HKUST's Robotics Education Produce So Many Entrepreneurs?

To understand why HKUST's robotics ecosystem has repeatedly given rise to companies, there is no bypassing the central thread of Li Zexiang—the figure who stitched together "students building robots with their own hands" and "turning the results into enterprises." According to his Baidu Baike entry, Li is a professor in HKUST's Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering and the founder of both the Automation Technology Center (ATC) and the Robotics Institute (RI) at the university. Since 1999^※, he has, together with colleagues and students, successively founded companies such as Googol Technology, DJI, QKM (李群自动化), and ePropulsion (逸动科技), pushing laboratory results into the marketplace. DJI is merely the brightest star on this list.

After 2014, this "master-apprentice entrepreneurship" model was systematised into an industrial base. According to Baidu Baike, Li Zexiang, together with Gao Bingqiang and Gan Jie, launched the Songshan Lake XbotPark^※—a robotics industry base in Dongguan—in 2014. The aim was to connect the research of Hong Kong and mainland Chinese universities with supply chains and venture capital into a pipeline of "product definition plus hardware entrepreneurship," cultivating hard-tech entrepreneurs from the ground up. The number of teams this base has spawned runs into the hundreds; its survival rate and unicorn conversion ratio are repeatedly cited as the performance report of the "Li Zexiang model" (the specific figures fluctuate with the counting date, so we do not nail them down here).

Pulling this thread back to campus: the HKUST Robotics Team is described as an entrepreneur's cradle not so much because the team itself is churning out companies, but because it heavily overlaps with Li Zexiang's continuum of "coursework → competition → postgraduate research → entrepreneurship." The sensor fusion, autonomous control, and teamwork students learn in Robocon are precisely the most taxing foundational competencies for hardware start-ups. The team's official statement that "passion is more highly regarded than pure skill," written into its selection criteria, and Li Zexiang's own principle of judging people on capability rather than grades are almost two versions of the same sentence. This, perhaps, is a more structural explanation for "Why does HKUST produce so many robotics entrepreneurs?" than any single competition result.

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# Checks and Clarifications: Which Popular Narratives Don't Hold Up?

Several claims circulate in popular discourse about this team and DJI. We fact-check them in the table below, to prevent the propagation of inaccuracies.

A note is necessary: for the early years (2004–2010), the publicly available Chinese-language records of each local contest's theme and HKUST's specific placing rely primarily on the Wikipedia compilation. Some years lack thematic titles or runner-up records; our chronology marks these gaps with "—" and does not fill them in with conjecture. For content involving living entrepreneurs such as Frank Wang, only publicly available, neutral facts (education, competition participation, company founding, awards received) are taken; unverified private assessments are excluded.

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